Website Accessibility Guide Home

Making Your HubSpot Website WCAG 2.1 Compliant

1.4.5 Images of Text

MCS Accessibility Team

MCS Accessibility Team
Last Updated July 23, 2020

The following directions are part of a full step-by-step guide to making a HubSpot website WCAG 2.1 AA compliant. These recommendations are intended for websites managed on the HubSpot CMS but can be adapted for other content management systems. In addition to explaining the WCAG Success Criteria and how to address them, this guide also describes how the AudioEye Managed solution may address each issue.

LEVELAA
Success Criteria

1.4.5 Images of Text

  • Resolved
  • Partially Resolved
  • Manually Managed
  • N/A - Level AAA
Principle: Perceivable
Information and user interface components must be presentable to users in ways they can perceive.
Guideline: Distinguishable
Make it easier for users to see and hear content including separating foreground from background.

If the technologies being used can achieve the visual presentation, text is used to convey information rather than images of text except for the following:

  • Customizable: The image of text can be visually customized to the user's requirements;
  • Essential: A particular presentation of text is essential to the information being conveyed.

Note 1: Logotypes (text that is part of a logo or brand name) are considered essential.

View Official WCAG 2.1 Compliance Techniques

  • This criteria is partially resolved and/or detected with AudioEye Managed but may require some manual intervention and/or collaboration with AudioEye.

Understanding 1.4.5 Images of Text

Any information that is valuable to the user should not be strictly an image. If the user might find the information useful, it should be able to be customized to fit their needs.

How AudioEye Helps

AudioEye uses IRIS and OCR (Optical Character Recognition) to provide alt tags for images of text, which can accelerate the remediation process. Certain images may be remediated through automated processes, while others may be manually observed and fixed by AudioEye testers and developers.

The reason this success criteria is only set to partially resolved is because:

Most site owners will benefit from authoring their own alt text and, over the long run, will not want the AudioEye solution or AudioEye personnel authoring site content that impacts the way images are conveyed to users relying on screen readers or the descriptions that might have an impact on a site’s SEO score. This is particularly true for online retailers. Relying on any 3rd party to author image descriptions isn’t advised. 

While AudioEye is effective at keeping images optimized to meet the Success Criteria, we always encourage site owners to take the little bit of time required to author short, meaningful descriptions on their own.

Warnings

AudioEye collaborates with Managed customers to assist them in identifying and understanding alternative descriptions for images of text. Images of text should be avoided. Certain assistive technologies include character limits for alt text and overly verbose alt descriptions lead to a poor user experience. 

Graphs, screenshots, and diagrams that convey information that is more than just text must include a written description of the data or include data in charts as HTML tables.

For more information, please visit the official W3C article: Understanding 1.4.5 Images of Text

Next Article: 1.4.10 Reflow

Download the WCAG 2.1 Compliance Checklist

Checklist Download

Questions?

Let us know if we can help you address this specific WCAG Recommendation.

    Recent Morey Creative Studios Blog Articles