ALT Text for Web Accessibility

In the semester web design course I teach for middle school students, I share a series of videos and activities in a lesson series on web accessibility. I first became aware of the importance of web accessibility when I served as the first “Director of Distance Learning” for the College of Education at Texas Tech University from 2001 to 2006. For publicly funded institutions like Texas Tech, creating and sharing accessible web content is a legal requirement. For all web developers, regardless of organization, web accessibility standards are an important best practice.

Today, I recorded a 5 minute video demonstrating how I teach students to understand and add alternate text tags (ALT tags) to images in both Google Sites and webpages created with the “new” Adobe Express.

I used the AI tool Descript.com to create a free transcript of my recorded video, and since I am “out of credits” with my paid Descript.com plan, I used ChatGPT to create a video description as well as time-stamped chapter titles and links. The video description is:

Learn how to enhance the accessibility of your web design projects by checking and adding ALT text for images using free tools like the Screen Reader Chrome extension. In this video, Wes Fryer, a middle school STEM and media literacy teacher, walks you through the process of evaluating ALT tags on student-created websites and how to ensure your designs are inclusive for visually impaired users. Whether you’re using Adobe Express or Google Sites, this guide provides actionable steps to improve accessibility in your projects.

The main Google Chrome extension I used and teach my middle school web design students to use is Chrome Screen Reader, paired with Extensity. (Both are free.) I also share a variety of other web accessibility checkers with them, and demonstrate several of these in class lessons.

Eventually I would love to empower my students to use AI tools to create draft descriptions for image ALT tags. This is a feature I love in the Ice Cubes Mastodon client app for iOS. With one touch I can create a useable alternate text description for any image I want to share on Mastodon, and readily edit that draft before publishing. I expect many web design tools and webpage editors (including Google Sites) will add this AI feature in the future.