You Are Not Done Yet: Text Accessibility

You are not done testing yet unless...

You've checked that all text is actually text and not a bitmap or video. Text rendered as a graphic is problematic for two reasons. First, accessibility clients such as screen readers can't see into bitmaps, videos, and animations, so any text embedded in such a graphic is invisible to anyone using accessibility features. Second, graphics with embedded text vastly complicate the localization process. Translating text simply requires modifying the application's resource files, but translating bitmaps and videos requires recompositing them.

If you must place text in bitmaps, you can mitigate your localization pain by creating the bitmaps dynamically at runtime using resourced text strings. Videos and animations may be runtime creatable as well depending on the toolset you use.

As for accessibility, ensure that the relevant information is available some other way: in the supporting text, by closed captioning, ALT tags in HTML, and so on.

Posted by The Braidy Tester at 07:30 AM  Permalink