best practices -- alt.text for science figures

[kellijohnson-NOAA]

Goals in order of priority

• list of available resources with short summary of the resource (i.e., one sentence or so that people can read to facilitate deciding if the resource would actually be helpful for them given the stage they are at)
• 4-5 best practices for creating alternative text with respect to scientific figures
• document how to add alternative text to figures within this package
• document how to add alternative text to figures in figures outside of this package

Participants

@chantelwetzel-noaa
@kellijohnson-NOAA
Anyone that is interested or has ideas

[kellijohnson-NOAA]

Resources

• Penn State Accessibility Image ALT Tag Tips for HTML: tagging for when figures are repetitive, 125 characters, example text
• Examples with a general template of how to write alternative text captions for scientific figures
• BrailleR r package: functionality for alternative text with ggplot2

[kellijohnson-NOAA]

Best practices

• Hard wrap lines at a xx characters, even for functions that display output and warnings,
  because screen readers cannot read text if it is off of the page sometimes.
• Include only additional information in the alternative text that is not in the caption because
  the screen reader will read both of them.

[kellijohnson-NOAA]

http://www.sigaccess.org/welcome-to-sigaccess/resources/describing-figures/
https://github.com/NOAA-FIMS/FIMS-planning/blob/main/FIMS.pdf