Open a photo
Photographic visual for Guides
GuideGuides

The written pages

Four essays, one argument each, on the parts of this job a findings list cannot settle for you — and which no tool, this one included, is going to settle by writing the sentence on your behalf.

The checker on the front page reads the shape of a sentence: whether it opens with words that get announced twice, whether it is a file name, whether it has run past what a listener will sit through. That is a real job and it is done well. It is also the mechanical part. The judgement is knowing what the sentence is supposed to contain, and that is a question about standards, about how speech works, and about what the picture is doing on the page — none of which a grader can see, and none of which arrives with a generated caption either.

So these four pages exist to answer the questions the findings keep pointing at. They are written to be read once and kept, they quote the specification where the specification says something and say so plainly where it does not, and none of them needs you to open a picture first.

  1. Guide 1 · about 5 minutesHow long alt text should beThe character count everyone quotes is a habit rather than a rule, and four kinds of picture are right to ignore it.
  2. Guide 2 · about 6 minutesWhat a screen reader announcesYour sentence is never heard on its own: the role is spoken first, and most alt-text mistakes are collisions with that.
  3. Guide 3 · about 5 minutesWhen the right alt text is noneSome pictures are furniture. Describing furniture is a cost paid by the one person who cannot skip it.
  4. Guide 4 · about 7 minutesWCAG 1.1.1 and GIGW, in plain termsThe success criterion is two sentences long. Most of what is attributed to it is house style, and an Indian government audit adds its own list.
  5. Guide 5 · about 5 minutesAlt text, caption and long description: three jobsThree texts sit beside a picture, each with a different reader. Writing one as if it were another is the most common mistake on the page.
  6. Guide 6 · about 4 minutesImages of text: when the alt text is the wordsA notice, a quote card or a screenshot carries words, and its alt text is those words — what WCAG 1.4.5 asks, and the limits of OCR.

What is deliberately not here

There is no page on getting a machine to write the description for you. This site has no captioning model: its drafts are assembled from the subject you type and the facts it can measure, so a guide to automatic captioning would be a guide to a button that is not here. Pulling the text out of a screenshot or a scan is a tool rather than an essay: the image to text page reads printed English and Hindi on your device, and the guide to images of text above says what to do with what it reads.

What is missing by accident rather than on purpose is a page about long descriptions inside a page — figures, details elements, the markup that holds a paragraph a chart needs. The route for writing one is already built; the essay about where to put it is not yet written.

The tools these pages describe