1. Tell your story with text

If your story is told only with images or videos, users who can’t see those visual elements will struggle to understand and engage with your content. It then becomes increasingly difficult if images are animated, have embedded text, or if you’re using video and other rich media.

Consider those Buzzfeed-type articles full of images with amusing captions right on the image. Those kinds of images are of no help to sight-impaired people who can’t enlarge the text or cannot see the photos at all.

Adding <alt> tags can help (more on those later), but describing complex imagery in an alt tag is not always easy or practical.

Consider how a complex image like this from this Buzzfeed article contributes to the narrative. How can we describe this image to someone who can’t read the text or see what’s happening in each of the three parts of the picture? Does the image contribute to the narrative? Are only the captions enough to understand the narrative? Does it matter who’s in the image, what they’re doing, or where they are? Do their emotions provide more context to the words?

By ensuring the text you write tells a compelling story, even if the images or other media are ignored or unavailable to be read, you’ll help provide a more accessible site with richer content.

This approach also applies to complex infographics or video content where alternative means of describing the context using text can become critical to ensuring access and engagement.