That’s a new thing in the class action lawsuit world - and it appears to be legit.
All I’ve been able to find out about it so far is that a major aspect is tht all pics must have a text that says what’s in the picture. I was able to do that with my old software but I can’t find it on Sparkle.
This is to help blind people when the site is read to them by a program.
You also have to have a “logical order” for your website, whatever that is.
I’m sure there are more aspects to it but I don’t know what they are yet. Those are the 2 things that were pointed out to me in the letter I received from the attorney
You received a letter from an attorney regarding problems with your website?
I have so far understood that it is only nice that people would make their websites as accessible as they can, but it still ought to be the sole prerogative of the website owner. The ALT tag has been there, but I thought it more as an optional nice-to-have for people and for SEO, I certainly did not think it was going to be necessitated by law?!
Yes, along with a phone call, my current website which I am in the process of rebuilding to replace it.
This has become a very big thing with literally thousands of people getting these letters.
One of the things they mentioned in that letter was not having the “background” labelling of the pictures so that blind people could get it read to them and understand what the pictures were about. Rather than fix the old site, which is a very easy deal, I want to build this site with the proper information in it, but I can’t see a way to alt text (I believe that’s the correct term) in Sparkle
I’m just guessing, since I am yet to do this, but selecting an image and then entering information here may just automatically create the necessary ALT content for that image.
@Mortgageguy, You have placed an image in a “box” element that is why you are not seeing what @phoenix1386 has showed you. You need to place the image into and “image” element and then you’ll be able to do three things…
Rename the image more to what it represents
Give the image a title
Give the image a description which is the “alt” you are referring too
Here. What I have done is select the image I have put up. The image is put using Insert > Image or by clicking the Image button at the top. What you have done is inserted a box.
Unfortunately this is becoming a big thing! By law here in Australia (because of a massive court case against the olympics that was held in Australia - they didn’t implement titles and alts on their website and a partially blind person sued them and was awarded a MASSIVE payout) all websites that go live has to accommodate for the partial or totally blind person, and we need to take into consideration the colours we use for the colour-blind.
In fact anything that we hover on that is active also needs to have a title so the web-readers can identify where the navigation will be taking the blind person.
Knowing that Google is becoming the “web police” us web designers need to be vigilant!
It would seem the ADA applicability is partial/questionable:
Also questionable is what exactly is regulated or checked for compliance.
Sparkle sites are generally better than the average site built years ago, but we can improve and we will.
You can currently set the image description on images, as mentioned earlier. Boxes are intended as “decoration” so they don’t have a description. Gallery images should have a description but we don’t currently have support for that, we’ll be adding it.
Color contrast is hard to measure and even available tools don’t do a great job (for example the WCAG tools say some combinations have good contrast according to their formula but when you look at it it’s clearly terrible).
Should you have to support the major color blindness or all the minorities? Or just the ones that are in sufficient numbers to interest lawyers for a class action?
The lack of objective rules or techniques is what makes all this fertile territory for lawyers, with no real interest in actual accessibility.
It seems that every way I can use a picture as a background and have the text slide up and over it places the background picture in a box which means no alt text is available, which is a definite no-no for ADA compliance.
I’ve waited to work on this more until after I was able to attend an ADA compliance meeting from an attorney and this is one of the minimum standards that must be done.
You are not required to use the image description for images that aren’t part of the content, meaning the are decorative elements that don’t change or enrich the meaning of the textual content.
That said you can right click on a box and convert it to an image, to get that.
Actually according to the attorney giving the seminar I attended AND the lawsuits of people in my industry, you are.
What you said makes sense so therefore it must not be legal. It’s a shame that’s the way it is and that’s how I was treating it, but I’ve gotten the letter also.
So to be safe, how can I use a picture like in the examples I posted without placing them in a box so I can add alt text?
@Mortgageguy, Background images are a CSS thing not html. As Duncan mentioned when an image is placed <img> the title and alt tags come with it. That is not the case for a background image.
If this bugs you then layer an image over your background image allowing your (in a sneaky way) to give your background image an alt and title.
