Communicating Image Content

While a picture is worth a thousand words, do you know what those words are communicating? The Internet is filled with visual graphics to present information, complement textual content, and/or add visual appeal. What happens if you or the user cannot see the images or visual content? How will you get the same information? Although containers for providing textual information (known as alternative text) for images already exist, most web pages do not utilize them. Even when alternative text is available, the descriptions are often vague and uninformative.

This paper reports on activities to provide guidance, a procedure for describing images, and a tool to support the creation of informative alternative text for all types of images. Evaluations of the procedure and tool confirm the promise of this approach, and have identified several improvements to increase usability.