Our Alt-text writers provide Alternate Text for images and media assets

Alternate text or Alt-text is used to describe an image or an asset like a video, a table, a flowchart, graph, photographs, diagrams etc. It's an alternative way to convey the information being provided by an image/asset. Providing alt text for your content is a part of the accessibility requirements that are covered under WCAG 2.0 Compliance, Section 508, and ADA in the US and similarly under WCAG 2.1 AA accessibility standard, Equality Act 2010, Disability Discrimination Act in European countries. Alt text is normally included in the HTML tags as a description of images which is read aloud by screen readers and is thus helpful for visually-impaired users. K12 Content Solution team understands that providing a clear and concise Alt-text is important because it provides the information in an alternative text-based format. It's important to mention that the accessibility requirements go beyond just the alt text. The requirements also cover things like providing for tabbed browsing, using appropriate colors and contrasts, and other essential inclusions to ensure that the content is fully compliant to all accessibility standards.   

Alt-text writing is becoming increasingly important because it provides the authors a flexibility to use images and other assets while still ensuring that the content meets the accessibility standards. It's not only useful for the blind users who use the screen readers or text-to-speech software, but is also useful when a thumbnail is missing or an image doesn't load due to low internet bandwidth or other issues. For a content that is published through a CMS, an LMS or other online learning platforms, alt text provides image descriptions to the search engine crawlers and thus provides SEO benefits. The Alt text writers at K12 Content Solutions team can comprehend concepts and the subjects and often work with SMEs to understand the depth and complexity of the message being conveyed by the image/asset, to ensure that the correct description is provided. The team ensures that the cognitive requirements are met and the text is simple, clear and easily comprehensible to the native language users without any redundant information. We specialize in Alt Text writing for Math, Science and Social Studies for pre-K and all the K-12 grades. We deliver the Alt Text in multiple formats including writing as a metadata in Adobe Bridge or as metadata written on spreadsheets to be fed into a content management system.

More about alt-text writing:

We write descriptive Alt-Text for images in your content to improve accessibility. The alt-text writing service provided by K12 Content Solutions, has always been appreciated by all our clients as they get positive feedback from the learners. Our writers and SMEs understand that alt-texts are the descriptions and explanation of images which are read out by screen readers to enable a differently-abled users to understand what is being represented by the image. The descriptive text includes all the important information being presented by the image. It’s important that the alt-texts are accurate for a good understanding of the image, else the image may be misinterpreted. In addition to helping people with visual disabilities alt-texts improve the experience of the learners who are not able to load images on web pages due to limited bandwidth or poor internet connectivity.

Our team of alt-text writers understand that it is important to write the alternate text in a language and a style that is easily comprehended by the respective audience, whether K-12, Higher-Ed or corporate users accessing the content.  The context of the image is as important as the image itself. Our writers understand that they should read the text surrounding the image or graphics to achieve accuracy in their description. The language being used should help to improve the accessibility of the image for the visually impaired. Most of the alternate text writers working with us are the subject matter experts who are specially trained on alt-text writing skills. The team not only write descriptions or alt-text for images, graphs, pictures, photos, diagrams, illustrations etc. but also for the video resources. 

We have developed capabilities to match the alt-text requirements of different online media, client specific platforms, tools, and digital asset management systems. Our team can write short alt-text within specified character/word limits, as well as an elaboration and descriptive long alt-text. The short alt-text provides only the critical information about the image within limited characters. The long alternate text provides complete information about an image as the writers are not limited by the character count while describing the image. We comply with WCAG 2.0 guidelines and relevant accessibility standards while writing the alt-texts. Our writers have sufficient exposure to the ADA and Section 508 standards of the United States.