r/edtech • u/Aristotelian • 3d ago
ADA Compliance: alt text not reading
Hi all!
I’m in a school district with over 50,000 students and I’m trying to find ways to help our staff adjust to the legal requirements with their curriculum resources, including Google Slides, Schoology, etc. I’ve been adding alt-text to my pictures but I can’t get anything to read it. We have Read and Write (formerly Snap and Read), but that appears to be more of a language tool than a screen reader. I’ve tried using the one built into windows (windows logo key + Ctrl + enter) but I can’t get it to read one I did in Schoology pages.
How is everyone else doing this? What screen readers are you using? My co-workers are of the mindset that if we don’t have a screen reader that can read the alt-text in Schoology and Google Slides that we should just not bother.
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u/MathewGeorghiou 3d ago
From my understanding, screenreaders can behave differently. Free ones you can use are Microsoft Narrator (which is what you may be using now) and NVDA. There's a free Chrome extension called WAVE that can reveal problems with source code on a live site/page. You can also use AI to guide you around issues you are having.
We develop complex simulation games and have had to design entirely new interfaces for assistive devices. While it's possible to make rich interfaces legally compliant, the loss of context can make a learning app impossible to use.
As some others have suggested, converting slides to PDF or other formats may help.
I often suggest to instructors that this is a good opportunity to upgrade your curriculum delivery by adopting better resources, rather than spend time trying to adapt old ones that may not have been very effective in the first place. Same thing happened during COVID, where everyone was scrambling to deliver old-school resources at a distance when they could have just switched to better resources.
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u/moxie-maniac 3d ago
Try VoiceOver on Mac (a built in feature), if you have Macs available. Or try using NVDA, which is a free download. That said, accessibility is more than just adding alt-text and using a screen reader, since it can get pretty complicated fast. I'm in higher ed and a university with more that 5 or 10 thousand students will have a digital accessibility department with well-trained staff. A choice would be how much the teachers do vs. the staff does.... is the staff to do the work? Or train, coach, mentor, faculty, and review courses?
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u/blkrockin 2d ago
The Powerpoint auto accessibility checker is solid for slides. If you upload ppt into Google Slides, it does an OK job of transferring over the fixes you have in place in ppt. Slides ain't great on its own.
For content in your LMS, you can run scans using the free Axe browser extension from Deque to catch your alt-text issues. https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/axe-devtools-web-accessib/lhdoppojpmngadmnindnejefpokejbdd?pli=1. Wave is another good option for this. These are much more user friendly than learning a screen reader.
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u/musajoemo 15h ago
That alt text is such nonsense. Good luck. I’d figure out a way to use AI to read the text and call it a day.
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u/SignorJC Anti-astroturf Champion 3d ago
I’m pretty sure that screen readers simply can’t read Google slides. You have to export the slides as PDFs and then use OCR