WebAIR

Are the text alternatives appropriate to a lower secondary school education level? (LNK15)

Why is this important?

As well as being accurate and appropriate, alternative text should also be easy to read. This will benefit all users but in particular people with specific learning disabilities who may have trouble reading and understanding complex text. A benchmark suggested by the W3C is to make sure text alternatives could be read and understood by somebody with a lower secondary school education level.

How to fix the problem

Readability tools are available online and are built into word processing applications, such as Microsoft Word. Such tools will provide you with an indication of how easily your alternative text can be read and understood. However, there are various definitions of readability measuring different aspects of text (e.g. average sentence length, average word length, percentage of words on an approved "safe" list etc.). Therefore, the output of such tools should be taken only as an indication rather than a definitive measurement of readability. Writing text that is easy to read may take some practice. The W3C provides a list of tips to reduce the complexity of text:

Example

No example is available.

Further Information

  1. http://www.read-able.com
  2. http://www.standards-schmandards.com/2005/measuring-text-readability/
  3. http://webaim.org/techniques/alttext/