Rich and Complex Content

Images are used to provide information and enhance the message of the textual content. All images should have a meaningful description to ensure that non-visual readers can benefit from the information they illustrate.

Image descriptions allow content developers to describe images and the ultimate goal is to enable an individual who cannot see to have the same user experience as a sighted person. Most importantly an image must be described to convey the context that it appears in.

Resources

The Accessible Books Consortium

ABC hosts a free 20 minute online training session on Accessible Images – describing what these are exactly and how best to tackle various types of images.  Very useful for beginners and handy for awareness training.

The DIAGRAM Centre

There are a host of resources designed to help content providers with image description. The POET tool “is an open-source web based image description training tool that helps people learn how to describe the various types of images found in digital books including complex images such as flow charts and Venn diagrams.”

Alongside this the DIAGRAM Centre also provides a set of comprehensive guidelines, samples and training. Work on these projects is on-going as accessibility features and products advance.

textBOX

textBOX is a content provider service dedicated to providing quality image descriptions for all digital media channels. New methods have been developed  for content analysis (ECHO) and image description (focus/LOCUS + PICTURE). Publishers can expect Word + HTML descriptions to be supplied alongside detailed dataBOX spreadsheets for all content.

Complex Image Guidance

Published in 2023, this guidance tackles how to describe extremely complex images in their many forms.