Site Picture/Banner Suggestion

[ColumbusGuy]

I have a problem which has been around since my eye surgeries at the beginning of last year, and I'm hoping it might not be too difficult to solve for the site people.  As a bit of background, I lost most of my vision just at Christmas of 2015, and had three surgeries which have gotten some of it back, but not all, so I use narration software to assist in doing web things.  In addition, I use high contrast pc settings that make the text appear as white on black since the normal way causes the text to be nearly invisible due to the glare of a white background.

 

Here's my problem, which is related to site banners and images in things like the Newsletter: quite often I can't make out enough detail of pictures, or any text to read when it's there...due to lack of contrast.  Some banners and images will have a narrated url if I mouse over them, which is no help in saying what the thing is for as that url often has no description of the image used.  How difficult would it be to put in a one or two word description of the banner contents that would be audible rather than the url?  Or perhaps it could appear in a little text pop-up as it is moused over?

 

This would be a great help to visually impaired, or even completely blind visitors to the site.  Thanks for any help you can give!

[Cia]

Okay, let's address this in an orderly fashion so I can be sure I cover everything. 

 

1) Yes, I can include alt-text in newsletter images. I will try that next week and you can PM me if you have any issues with it. 

2) Yes, I can include alt-text titles in images I post on the forums for games. I've just edited the image for the White Elephant game, if you'd like to check that. I will pass this along to site staff to ask them to do so for any posts they make as well. 

3) We will check what sort of features the site has for places like site banners, signatures, etc... 

4) User-generated content: I will include information in the faq topics where relevant about adding images suggesting people change the title to describe the image where that feature is allowed, but trying to require that take far too much moderation time to scan for new images added and contact members who don't know how to do this. 

[FormerMember4]

15 hours ago, Cia said:

Okay, let's address this in an orderly fashion so I can be sure I cover everything. 

 

1) Yes, I can include alt-text in newsletter images. I will try that next week and you can PM me if you have any issues with it. 

2) Yes, I can include alt-text titles in images I post on the forums for games. I've just edited the image for the White Elephant game, if you'd like to check that. I will pass this along to site staff to ask them to do so for any posts they make as well. 

3) We will check what sort of features the site has for places like site banners, signatures, etc... 

4) User-generated content: I will include information in the faq topics where relevant about adding images suggesting people change the title to describe the image where that feature is allowed, but trying to require that take far too much moderation time to scan for new images added and contact members who don't know how to do this. 

Thank you Cia. This is so extremely helpful to those of us who are blind or visually impaired.

[ColumbusGuy]

Thanks Cia!  You have no idea how unfriendly some sites are, like Google Mail...with high-contrast settings, some buttons completely disappear, and you don't know they're there unless the mouse pointer changes when you hit one...and they are remarkably lax in labelling buttons in other cases.  What really irks me is Hotmail, whick is my main client--they use symbols for some things, and rather having labels that pop up or audible cues saying what it is, you just get the name of the symbol, like 'Boomerang' instead.  What the heck is that?!

Any way, thanks for looking into this for us!

[FormerMember4]

9 hours ago, ColumbusGuy said:

Thanks Cia!  You have no idea how unfriendly some sites are, like Google Mail...with high-contrast settings, some buttons completely disappear, and you don't know they're there unless the mouse pointer changes when you hit one...and they are remarkably lax in labelling buttons in other cases.  What really irks me is Hotmail, whick is my main client--they use symbols for some things, and rather having labels that pop up or audible cues saying what it is, you just get the name of the symbol, like 'Boomerang' instead.  What the heck is that?!

Any way, thanks for looking into this for us!

Don’t get me started on Google. Their accessibility team and efforts are a joke.

[ColumbusGuy]

2 hours ago, BlindAmbition said:

Don’t get me started on Google. Their accessibility team and efforts are a joke.

 

They have a team?  Wow, who'da thunk it! 

[FormerMember4]

5 minutes ago, ColumbusGuy said:

 

They have a team?  Wow, who'da thunk it! 

I was a tester when chromebook first came out. They had a tendency to overlook the serious accessibility issues pointed out. Finally gave up. Not a priority for google.