Michelle from (Extra)ordinary Tech Stories gets the web

I love seeing examples of people caring about the craft of making websites. An example I wanted to share was from an email I received about an interview I did for  (Extra)ordinary Tech Stories.

We recently implemented some tweaks to improve the accessibility of the website which included providing a short alternative text describing the photo(s) within the blog posts as part of the submission form.

This helps to make the blog posts and our site more accessible to users with assistive technology and gives those sharing their story the agency over deciding how they’d like to describe themselves and their photos.

As this wasn’t part of the process when we did your blog, we’d like to offer you an opportunity to include an alt text for the image(s) in your post retrospectively.

I don’t think I’ve ever been specifically asked to provide alt text for a photo I’ve been provided for an interview. Alt text is so important, for the reasons Michelle outlined in her email and more!

I’m a massive fan of making small, incremental changes to a website to help make things better for everyone.

Great work Michelle Szaraz!

P.S, if you click through and read the interview, you might wonder why my image doesn’t have alt text. I’ve decided that in the context of that interview, the image is purely decorative, and it doesn’t add anything to the interview to have my physical appearance described. This is a personal choice and very subjective.