AltText: An institutional tool for change

Alternative Text (AltText) is widely recognized as a key principle of digital accessibility and accessible publishing (PAAG, 2023). It has also been discussed as a creative writing practice (Finnegan & Coklyat, n.d.), and as an access tool for museums and cultural institutions (Wilson, 2011). In the January 2023 issue of Curator: The Museum Journal (Cecilia et al., 2023), we considered the rather fragmented and decadal delays of the museum sector and the sector's peer-reviewed publishers to fully adopt the principles of the UN Convention of the Rights of Persons with Disabilities in the migration to digital first publishing (Cecilia et al., 2023). In that editorial, we announced that Curator: The Museum Journal has adopted a new policy to increase inclusion in our journal and advocated for wide adoption of that policy throughout the museum sector.

In this Editorial, we broaden our discussion of alternative text or “AltText” as we will be calling it—and more generally the discussion of digital access in scholarly journals by examining it as an institutional, political, and activist tool. Understanding the way professional publishing sector can deploy access tools like AltText provides the foundation on which this journal, Curator: The Museum Journal, will be presenting our framework for structuring accessible content that will benefit authors and readers. The insights gained from our research will allow authors to reflect on the intricate link between images and text and how they work together to illustrate a particular claim. As announced in our January 2023 editorial, we employ Rose's (2012) approach to understand the significance of cultural images, using technological, compositional, and social modalities to discuss images' sites of production, audiencing, the image itself, and the site of its circulation.

In this Editorial, we focus on understanding the site of production and audiencing, reflecting on the complex relationship between authors and potential readership, and the multimodal nature of authorial narratives.

Advocacy to prioritize accessibility from an institutional perspective is not a new phenomenon in the museum sector. The question has been at the forefront of museum publishing since the mid-1980s when physical access to buildings started restructuring our buildings. But even after 40 years of progress, professionals and academics continue to agree on the need for even more sector-wide change. At this writing, 23 years into the 21st century's digital revolution, it has become apparent that there is need for a new focus on how inclusion can permeate processes and operations at all levels.

Our 2022 quick assessment of a sample of the major museum websites and related peer-reviewed publications revealed that the vast majority of the images on museum webpages are without Alt attribute tags to define AltText, despite these tags being considered a required attribute for HTML standards for more than 25 years (Bowen et al., 2001; Gleason et al., 2019; Lisney et al., 2013). The lack of Alt attribute tags is often the main accessibility error found by most accessibility-checker software and is often flagged as the main priority for improvement.

As a peer-reviewed global journal, we apologize to our readers who have needed these accommodations, and admit to our complicity over the past decades for the exclusions we created. We admit to our error in not making AltText an editorial priority before we commenced this transformation in 2021.

We find important research as early as 2002, when Howitt and Mattes advocated for the needs of all users to be considered from the early stages of web resources' development. Their call for an equitable audience-centered approach to the development of websites and web resources was prompted by the development of the British Museum “COMPASS” resource in 2000. Despite that critical work at a major global institution, their recommendations were relegated to a sidebar in our accessibility work and the work of our museum publishing peers. We acknowledge that this tacit oversight is not exclusively our own omission, and find that digital accessibility remains outside the priorities of the sector, and the reminder of how long digital access has been ignored remains a crisis in the legitimacy of the museum sector to serve all of their audiences.

In brief, on a theoretical level, there is a consensus that good accessibility starts at the top and is implemented at every level of the digital experience design. Two decades of studies (Huntsman, 2022; Jones, 2022; Wilson, 2011) have continuously mounted more evidence on how an accessible vision needs to be embraced by everyone responsible for publishing, and at every step of the digital journey. Accessibility researchers have demanded a shift toward more accessibility in scholarly work, from the early stages of research and projects, where aims and outcomes are established. Which is to say, our requirements and guidelines for authors to provide AltText at the manuscript submissions stages are important, we also acknowledge that these guidelines are not enough.

Some sector standards, like PAAG, 2023 and W3C (n.d.), require websites and academic material to be accessible for screen reader users. But the work by members of our team leading up to our change in policy has found the reality of accessibility to be far more fragmentary.

At this writing, publications are still fundamentally inaccessible from both a technological and an epistemological perspective. In an effort to overcome this accessibility problem, and in response to various public policies in the UK (i.e., Equality Act 2010¹ & Public Sector Bodies Accessibility Regulations²), the USA (ADA³), and EU (EAA due to be implemented in 2025⁴), English language publishers have started to add requirements for authors, including submitting AltText with images for their manuscripts. And, we note, our journal joins the ranks of journals working to remediate this historical oversight with our own migration to required AltText. However, what remains unknown at this writing is whether a requirement for researchers and authors to provide AltText has an impact on experienced accessibility for vision-impaired readers and other users of text-to-speech technology.

As mentioned in the previous editorial, Curator: The Museum Journal, as part of the Wiley publishing family, collaborated with University College London on the project “Creating accessible digital images,” funded by the UCL Centre for Critical Heritage Studies. The project builds on findings from the “Inclusive Visions” project, which looked at the experience of vision-impaired museum visitors, and how they make meaning of the environment, collections, and digital resources (Cecilia, 2022). “Creating accessible digital images” perceives AltText not only as alternative explanatory text with images, but also as part of the broader sector's effort toward more equitable offers of cultural participation. It frames AltText as part of the creative and critical practice of research and academic writing, and as a political tool to acknowledge vision impaired and people with disabilities as members of the museum and academic community, both as audiences and as researchers. As part of the study, we interviewed 12 vision-impaired researchers and 10 sighted academics, museum and publishing professionals who employ and/or use AltText in their research and work practice in the UK, the USA, France, and Italy.

In line with the idea that accessibility must be considered at the beginning of each research project, findings from the initial stage of the research show that accessibility concerns, and in particular adding AltText, cannot be considered just at publications' submission stage. When this happens, it means that authors perceive the submission requirements as challenging, time-consuming, often boring, and end-in-itself task, and infer that creating AltText does not contribute to their creative and critical research process. As a result, it appears that asking authors to provide AltText as a requirement for submission may lead to the production of rushed text disconnected from the image and the text they are linked to.

To achieve that sectorial change that has been advocated for the first quarter of the century, it is, therefore, necessary to acknowledge that there is an intimate link between research and its publication. We believe that institutions who support research have a responsibility to include requirements that ensure that authors embed accessibility concerns into the early stages of their research and writing, making that work a powerful interpretative tool that reflects on the nature of images and their relationship with the text and the research itself.

AltText is not just a resource for vision-impaired users, it is also a resource for individuals like this participant who require other accommodations but still rely on screen readers, needs that are rarely acknowledged or addressed in existing guidelines and legislation.

AltText is an interpretative resource that enables users who require support of screen readers, including those with low or no vision, to understand an image in the context of the manuscript. From the user's perspective, AltText is often the only tool to help them independently access information from the visual elements of a paper.

We also found that authors who consider AltText as part of their manuscript development find that the approach is a powerful resource to creatively reflect on their work and to think critically about the images they choose to support their publications. But prior research has identified some challenges. More than a decade before this writing, Rose (2012) found that text in alternative tags contributes to the cultural significance of images. But more recently, Conrad (2021) found that the majority of authors who are sighted still create AltText based on tacit visual biases that infer their readers can visually access the image and the surrounding text.

Other authors also confirmed how verbalizing both the image description and the context either made them re-evaluate their image choices, or strengthen their understanding of the image in context through multimodal narratives, which was then reflected in the final AltText and revisions to their manuscript.

Creating AltText offers authors an opportunity to directly communicate with their readers in a way that is less formal than what is expected in the main body of a peer-reviewed manuscript. While journal article captions aim to be short and set the context for an image, AltText is intentionally published to allow those using screen readers to experience the content of an image when it cannot be observed. Should readers wish to see an example, we direct your attention to the extensive description to support an image of a 19th-century plate that reflected historical Western European prejudice when we were first working with authors to test our proposed policy (Vawda & Denison, 2022). These texts do more than simply describe what can be seen, they include the voice of the author guiding the reader through its choices in the context of the research, providing additional insights into that research, and the priorities and decision-making processes relevant to that work.

It is important here to acknowledge that aligning narrative styles and content is essential to develop multimodal resources to deliver authorial meaning. Using AltText to provide multimodal representation of content in different formats, authors create accessible narratives that enable its presentation to diverse audiences through the use of diverse technology. AltText provides a window into the multimodal nature of the authorial narrative practice that frames the research but is seldom included in a final manuscript.

By embracing multimodal authoring, authors develop awareness and understanding about the relationship between meaning-making and multimodal resources (primarily texts and images, but potentially also video, sound, and other media). Authors directly communicate to readers their understanding of the image and their priorities, guiding the reader's “gaze” on the visual elements that are most significant to situate the image in context. If we consider the decision of including an image in a paper as a curatorial act, the AltText becomes a description that breaks the barrier of formality and establishes direct communication with the reader, casting a light on what remains unseen. This ultimately enables authors to guide the reader to focus on images beyond a quick scrolling glance.

As we consider the interpretative potential of AltText for this journal and for the museum sector as a whole, we believe that AltText is more than an access tool for vision-impaired readers, in the same way audio descriptions in museum galleries have become important mainstream interpretative resources that add value and depth of understanding for everyone.

Used as an interpretative tool, whether in this journal, or in any museum sector context, AltText is an added layer for all users and not just those who require a screen reader. For this journal, AltText's role is, first and foremost, to creating accessible textual content for those who cannot fully access visual elements using sight. Access and inclusion are deeply connected to the way people develop their professional identity in the museum and cultural heritage sector, and therefore, to access the breadth of lived experience that can make the sector stronger, it is essential that the peer-reviewed literature is structured to support all who wish to contribute to our field. It is these principles that led our journal to commit to multi-lingual publishing, and now, as the next step in that access, to revising our policy to ensure that we remediate the historical exclusion of those who require screen readers.

The fact that people who require visual accommodations have been actively excluded and constantly underrepresented in the museum workforce is a regrettable condition that is finally being surfaced in the museum literature (i.e., Aitchison et al., 2020; Fox & Sparkes, 2020; Goudas, 2020). Within this cultural shift, publishers have the opportunity to lead the change embracing the use of AltText and other access and inclusion resources as a political tool to increase the visibility of all researchers, authors, and users. By making it visible and establishing it as best practice, AltText would be transformed from a hidden nuisance to an interpretative tool that enables vision-impaired academics to be acknowledged as part of the researchers' community.

We believe that our re-examination of the peer-reviewed publications' responsibility to create accessible content is an activist practice that opens new discourses on the political nature of tools like AltText. If we broaden the discourse around the representation of people requiring specific accommodations in the academic fields of museum and heritage studies and the museum sector in general, it is clear that those individuals whose voices have been suppressed for far too long, and continue to be underrepresented or neglected, not just as audiences, but also as professionals, can become more active contributors who can improve practice for everyone.

Based on the findings from the “Creating accessible digital images” project, creative and critical AltText enables authors to reflect on the cultural significance of images. Acknowledging the multimodal nature of authorial narratives and power of authorship and textual practice in the digital era of academia does not lie just in the words we use as researchers, but also in the way we communicate and acknowledge different abilities and different modalities in our practice. Embracing this activist role leads to meaningful change and equitable innovation, which is at the base of the sector shift for academic publishing and has the potential to influence the larger museum practice.

With the 2023 adoption of the AltText policy, we again apologize to those who have been excluded from the visual dialogues that has informed museum practice, and acknowledge that the museum sector is the poorer because of those biases. In changing our policy, we hope that we can move toward a more inclusive approach to publishing, and look forward to how this type of inclusive practice will make museums better workplaces and learning environments for all.