Prepared by Sidney Gao and James Van Mil – September 2021

The Digital Content Team is dedicated to ensuring that newly created digital collections are accessible to all users. This document addresses the accessibility standards by which images (JPGs or TIFs) in newly created collections will be held. These standards will not be applied to existing images ingested to a UC Libraries repository.

This plan outlines a progressive approach for supporting the accessibility needs of images stewarded by the Digital Content Team. Further attention is needed to understand how to support the accessibility of born-digital collections, which is outside the scope of this document.

Image Descriptions and Alternative Text

The Digital Content Team will create image descriptions for all individual images in new digital collections. Images that appear within another format, such as a photograph as part of a newspaper article, will receive alternative text (alt-text).

Both image descriptions and alt-text will follow guidelines set by the American Anthropology Association. Definitions of each are as follows:

  • An image description is a detailed explanation of an image that provides textual access to visual content; most often used for digital graphics online and in digital files; can be used as alt text in coding to provide access to more complete information.

  • Alt-text is a brief textual explanation of an image, used in the coding of digital graphics online and in digital files; alt text is not visible on websites unless the image does not appear.

The Plan

For focused digital collections, the DCT will address image accessibility remediation as part of the standard digitization workflow.

Should providing image accessibility remediation exceed the current capacity of the DCT (either due to existing project workload or large collection size), project stakeholders will collaborate on a plan to provide image descriptions and/or alt-text. This will likely result in training one or two extra student staff members to work on image accessibility remediation; the DCT will review and QC image descriptions prior to ingest.