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Practicum: Interrogate your images for more impactful alt text and extended descriptions

Handouts

Presented at 9:00 am in Penrose 2 on Thursday, November 20, 2025.

#41140

Speaker(s)

  • Laura Ciporen, Digital Content Accessibility Manager, McGraw Hill Education

Session Details

  • Length of Session: 1-hr
  • Format: Lecture
  • Expertise Level: All Levels
  • Type of session: General Conference

Summary

Dig below your image's pretty surface to reveal what it really has to say to those who see it, then translate that into impactful image descriptions. We will interrogate sample images with 3 deceptively simple questions & structure the answers for minimal cognitive load & maximum comprehension. Using the essential ways content for education differs from that for information, we ensure our students have the tools they need to understand material & prove—or disprove—their learning via assessments.

Abstract

Many people struggle with what to say, if anything at all, about the content of their images. This can lead to surface-level image descriptions which do not serve our blind and low-vision students well. Yet in most cases you do not need to be a subject matter expert to create rich, useful, clear, and straight-forward alt text and extended descriptions. You just need an education-specific way of categorizing the image's purpose and the right approach to evaluate what the image is communicating. In this session I will present my education-centered approach to writing image descriptions and applying this approach to a range of image styles from graphs to mood-setters with uses from content-presentation to assessment. If you have attended my alt text sessions before, this is a chance to see the principles in action on multiple examples.

Keypoints

  1. To write informative image descriptions you need to know the right questions to ask yourself about the image.
  2. The educational context is special in ways that should inform the content of image descriptions.
  3. Examples of mediocre vs. improved image descriptions will help you get the hang of writing better ones.

Disability Areas

Vision

Topic Areas

Accessible Course Design, Uncategorized, Web/Media/App Access

Speaker Bio(s)

Laura Ciporen

IAAP CPACC. Creating inclusive content (with WCAG-based accessibility) for higher education since 2015.

Handout(s)