We’ve added a couple of changes to the information available for each image in the library that we think have big potential for making your Easy Read more accessible. When you click into an image from the library you'll now see a short text summary of each image and some suggested alternative text (alt text). 

Summaries

A summary tells you in some detail what is shown in the image. It could be used as a starting point in discussions about the image and the topic it represents, or it could give you inspiration about how you might build your own images in our Picture Editor tool.

We also hope these summaries will be helpful for blind and partially sighted people who may want to work with our images. This is an area we’d love to improve further, so if it’s something of particular interest to you let us know your ideas or suggestions for improvement by email.

Alt text

Alt text is a much shorter summary designed to be used with the images in your own documents or on webpages. Alt text is a description of an image for people who use screen readers and for search engines. Our alt text is a starting point, we recommend that you tweak it before you use it based on how you’re using the image.

You can copy it by clicking the copy button and pasting it into the alt text field on whatever software you’re using to create Easy Read.

We get asked about alt text a lot. We know it’s a big concern for organisations who follow Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG). However, because of the unique way that images in Easy Read are used to closely match the written text, some people have told us that they find the use of alt text in Easy Read repetitive or confusing. We’re still exploring this issue with our Expert Advisers, with other disabled people and by looking at existing research. 

For this reason, we haven’t built alt text into every area of our Easy Read system just yet. Once we’ve found a solution that we think will improve accessibility for the most people we’ll let you know. In the meantime, we recommend that you take advice from the disabled people you work with about their specific needs and preferences.

However, for standalone images such as social media posts or illustrative images on webpages, alt text has long been known to improve accessibility, and we hope that you’ll find our suggested wording useful.

Helping us improve 

While this new feature beds in, we’d love it if you could help us improve by letting us know if you spot something in a summary or alt text suggestion that could be improved. Just press the feedback button in the top right of your screen and let us know.

We’d also love to hear about how you’re using summaries and alt text in your work, so we can learn from your ideas and share them with the rest of the Photosymbols community.