Introduction
Accessibility means that everyone can perceive, understand, navigate and interact with your PageTiger documents with ease.
Assessments are a great way to test visitors knowledge in an interesting and engaging way, as well as providing an insight into their progress and enabling you to acknowledge areas for improvement. It's possible to add an image to a question in an Assessment, to support the question or add visual interest, or use as the answers in an Image Choice question. Image Choice questions are easy to understand and show a visualisation of the answer options, prompting the visitor to pick the image to suit their answer. This is where Alt Text comes in...
What is Alt Text?
Alt Text describes an image on a page or used within a piece of interactivity, and helps visually impaired visitors understand what the image shows. When a PageTiger document is viewed in Accessible Mode, the Alt Text will be read aloud by the visitors screen reader. The main goal is to ensure that visitors with different abilities can engage with your document and take part in all modules when they visit it.
Alt Text also helps search engine bots understand image contents and will appear on a page if an image fails to load.
Alt Text in Assessment modules
It's important to carefully consider the choice of wording used for Alt Text - think about the scenario and the type of question or answer being used. This is particularly important if the image is the answer - you don't want to give it away!
Scenario 1 - Image Choice question
Correct
The Alt Text provides descriptive information about the image without explicitly revealing the answer. This approach ensures that visitors relying on a screen reader or other assistive technology receive meaningful information while maintaining the challenge of identifying the answer based on visual cues.
Example Alt Text to correctly describe a photograph of a cheetah
A large cat with black spots covering most of its sandy yellow fur.
Incorrect
The Alt Text describes the image, rather than information about it. This means the screen reader is effectively reading out the answer and revealing it to the visitor.
Example Alt Text to incorrectly describe a photograph of a cheetah
A photograph of a cheetah laying in the grass.
Scenario 2 - Using an image for a question
Example 1
An image can be used as the question and the visitor must identify what it it. For example, 'Can you name this city?' is accompanied by a photograph of the River Thames in London, and the available answers are Paris, London and Manhattan. We don't want to reveal the answer in the Alt Text, so have used 'A vast cityscape of a winding river with a drawbridge that has two distinctive towers'.
Example 2
An image can be used as a visual to create a richer experience for your visitors. It doesn't reveal anything about the answers, but simply adds visual interest. For example, a photograph of laptop and mobile phone has been used to accompany the question 'When can mobile devices by used in the workplace?'. The Alt Text describes the photograph so the visitor knows what it is without having to see it - 'A photograph of a laptop on a desk, accompanied by a phone, plant, and coffee'.
