In an effort to increase awareness to Age Related Macular Degeneration (AMD) , February has been designated as Low Vision Awareness Month. More than 4 million Americans have low vision (for varying reasons).
Providing image descriptions is one way you can help make the world more accessible for this population of the disability community. Image descriptions provide a textual explanation of what is in an image, which allows a person to understand the visual content that they might not be able to see clearly. Image descriptions can be used on when you post an image on social media or verbally during a presentation when an image is included in a powerpoint. Essentially, image descriptions can be used any time it is important for viewers to understand the visual content or when the image is complex and requires additional context to fully grasp its meaning. If you have never utilized image descriptions, you can use image descriptions, or alt text, by right-clicking on an image, then select ‘inspect’ in your developer tools. The ‘alt’ attribute will display the image description in your browser’s developer tools. If using a screen reader, the screen reader will automatically read out the alt text when you navigate to the image.
