alt attribute

So that in there lies the difference.

If you have a graphic that's marked decorative, it may or may not have alt text.

But the important thing for you to know is it's not really a part of the overall message PowerPoint's trying to get across.

So that's a little bit about basic navigation, how to move between objects, and how to edit an object without moving it.

Let's talk for a minute about the accessibility checker.

I'm not going to be able to spend a lot of time on this, and we can go into more depth on it in future trainings.

But essentially, it's going to check your PowerPoint slides for basic accessibility things like font inconsistencies, color contrast, whether or not your images have alt text.

And I'm going to actually run it on the PowerPoint we have open.

So we get those fixed.

We also then found out, uh, that, uh, they had hyper-optimized their alt text for their images, and Google had a hidden devaluation for that.

So, 'cause they said, like...

And this is like 10 years ago.

We, we reviewed your reconsideration request.

There's still one thing." And we're like, "But we did everything on the list." And then I found they had 8,000 keyword stuffed title tags.

I mean, alt text.

By the way, don't use AI to write your alt text, I beg of you, unless you read it, because I'm doing auditing on sites and there's entire paragraphs and that is gonna look like keyword stuffing.

This one might be birds at dawn.

The alt text, the alt text is basically the way of saying Google-

So we hang, keying on for, so the file name-

Sure

You don't have to re-upload every single file to your inventory.

Yeah.

But if you are, whether you're on WordPress or Squarespace or whatever tool you're using, Showit, whatever, you can go into your media library and add alt text, add captions, write what you would expect to see-

Yeah

How do we fix those to make sure they're accessible? But then again, it does go down to the course materials themselves, the PowerPoint, the Word docs, PDFs, things like that.

So I guess where I like to think about it is from the beginning, can we just design courses and course materials to be accessible no matter what, right? So w- without having this pressure from this external factor, can we just make our materials the right way so that they're accessible all the way? Now, I'm fully admit I'm guilty of not doing that though, right? Because it's a lot of work, especially when it comes to something like alt text.

And I'm-- you coming from a clinical field in, in biology and medical physics, I'd love to hear your p- thoughts on this too.

But when you have to have, if you have a PowerPoint deck with, you know, 30 different figures, and they all have to have really well-articulated alternative text o- behind those figures so that screen readers can read them, how do you do that well? How do that, do that effectively, right? Um, same thing with, uh, you know, handwritten notes.

But you know, even if it was, you have to be able to transcribe that into either text or LaTeX or something like that.

So how do you do that effectively, right? And what a lot of people, you know, myself, I'm starting to dabble in this, starting to do my own redesigns with ADA is that, um, can we use AI tools to help us with this? And that's where my campus is starting to lean on some of these tools.

So c- can you upload your handwriting for these numerical problems and have a tool like Claude or Gemini translate it into LaTeX for you, and then you fix the errors? Uh, alt texts, upload your PowerPoint with the figures, have it write the alt texts for you, and then you can add it later, right? So I think for faculty trying to say, "Oh no, this is another thing we have to do," even though it's a worthy cause, don't get me wrong, it is, it's just a lot of extra work.

It's something else to worry about.

Yeah.

I'll probably do this another time, but I just want to take a quick hit and tell people about the joys of writing alt text.

I see nothing but complaints about alt text.

And I don't know how, but accidentally I just found joy in it.

I actually sometimes put jokes in my alt text, which AI yells at me about when they catch, you know, so I'm having Claude review the stuff and it'll say, you know, you, did you mean to put that in the alt text? And I'm like, no.

Yes, I did.

Because if there's a joke, if there's a visual pun, then why not share that with the students? Why not tell, you know, there's a visual pun in here.