File name as Alternative Text

Error Report

What Is Alternative Text?

Alternative text or alt text is a brief, 100-125 characters long, description of an image. This description is extremely important when students come across an image that has become suddenly unavailable and when students who rely on a text-to-speech or screen reader Links to an external site. program to navigate the web access your course content. In the former case, the alt text is visible to any sighted person. In the latter case, the alt text is read aloud or translated to braille.

Why Is This Important?

When an image has a filename for its Alternative text (text that is meant to provide a brief description of the image), students who cannot see the image but can access the alt text will often have difficulty understanding the purpose of the image as filenames are rarely adequate descriptions. For example, if your Clemson tiger paw has the filename orange-2.png, students who cannot see the image but can access the alt text are more likely to think that the image is a color swatch or a fruit.

Cause Of Error

To get this UDOIT result, you have to have uploaded and embedded an image to your course content without editing the alt text. Most often, this is achieved through the Insert Content tabbed panel in the right sidebar, which does not yet provide a place where you can edit the alt text. However, it is also possible to do this from the Embed Image Button in the Rich Content Editor toolbar. When an image that has been uploaded to Canvas and embedded in the course content, Canvas automatically puts the filename as your alt text because filenames are better than no alt text at all.

UDOIT can tell that an alt text has a filename because of the .png, .jpg, .gif, etc. that appears at the end of the alt text.

Examples

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How To Fix It

Last Updated January 2017.
Clemson Online