User Needs

This outcome helps people who have difficulty perceiving visual content. Assistive technology can read text aloud, present it visually, or convert it to braille.

Text alternatives may help some people who have difficulty understanding the meaning of photographs, drawings, and other images (e.g., line drawings, graphic designs, paintings, three-dimensional representations), graphs, charts, animations, etc.

People who are deaf, are hard of hearing, or who are having trouble understanding audio information for any reason can read the text presentation. Research is ongoing regarding automatic translation of text into sign language.

People who are deaf-blind can read the text in braille.

Additionally, text alternatives support the ability to search for non-text content and to repurpose content in a variety of ways.