Alt text

[William Haynes]

Is it possible to add alt-text descriptions to geogebra_applets for accessibility?

Ideally,  Numbas variables could be substituted into the description.

Thanks,

Will

[Christian Lawson-Perfect]

There isn't an option in the extension to do that at the moment. I've had a look at the GeoGebra page on accessibility and it says this:

"If you make a text object in GeoGebra called altText, altText2, altText3D then it will be attached to Graphics View 1, Graphics View 2, Graphics View 3D respectively."

So I suppose you'd write a description of what's in the graphics view, and put that in `altText` using the geogebra_applet function's object definitions argument.

There isn't a single way of doing alt-text properly for interactive diagrams. If the diagram is static, then it could make sense to provide some static alt text describing the diagram. But if it's interactive, then alt-text isn't the right way to go: the user would need to be able to find out what the current state of the diagram is at any time. Ideally, the interactive pieces of the diagram would describe themselves when focused - maybe setting the "Caption" property on objects in GeoGebra would help with that?

Often one easy thing you can do is just to put some text before or after the worksheet, describing it and how to interact with it. This is accessible to everyone, not just screen-reader users.

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[William Haynes]

Christian,

Thanks for looking into this.   I made a quick example question and tested it using the accessibility feature "voice over" on my Mac, which provides spoken information about the objects on screen.

It basically works: I can create a Numbas string variable, and pass it to the Geogebra applet as a text object named "altText" and that string will be spoken.   In addition and automatically, the Geogebra applet provides spoken descriptions of all visible objects and even permits free objects to be moved using the mouse.

Maybe this checks the accessibility box, but I found the verbal descriptions confusing, overwhelming, and unhelpful, and I imagine that it would be extremely difficult or downright impossible for a blind user to make much sense of them.

It is obvious to me that supplying good accessibility for interactive diagrams is a very difficult problem, and one that I won’t be attempting to solve anytime soon!

Thanks,

Will

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