Making content accessible: Guidelines for MITL staff: Describing infographics

Infographics provide useful information. But, infographics display information visually and the text in them is not readable by a screen reader.

To make infographics accessible, you need to describe the information shared in the visuals, and any text in the image.

The preferred method to do this is to include this information in the page's text or to link in the alt text or caption to a page with the description.

Some things to keep in mind:

• When listing items like in the above alternative text, include semicolons in between items, not commas
• Alt text is not needed if the information you would include in the alt text is already included either
  • in the caption or
  • in the text of the page

Example:

This is an infographic taken from MIT's Sloan School that I have cut off for this example. Therefore, the description text does not represent the whole infographic. Some of the descriptive text was omitted because it duplicated information already described.

Infographic:

Alternative text:

"Infographic of 8 ways Intentional Orchestrators outperform other organizations. View this page for a complete description of the infographic." 

OR

"Infographic of 8 ways Intentional Orchestrators outperform other organizations. See this page's text for full description."

Page text (either on this page or another page):

Intentional Orchestrators outperform other organizations in eight ways:

1. Aligning workforce needs with strategic goals and objectives

   1. Intentional Orchestrators are 5x more effective than Non-Orchestrators at aligning workforce needs with organization wide strategies

      1. 96% of Intentional Orchestrators agree or strongly agree with the statement, “My organization is effective at aligning workforce needs with business strategies and objectives” versus 18% of Non-Orchestrators

2. Allocating work among internal and external workers

   1. 89% of Intentional orchestrators feel that their organizations take the right approach to distributing work throughout their ecosystems versus 15% of Non-Orchestrators

3. Accessing workers to accomplish strategic objectives

4. Integrating external workers into their organization's culture

5. Managing the workforce across functional areas

6. Measuring worker performance

7. Managing the workforce for maximum performance

8. Supporting workforce management and growth with technology