Enhancing the UDOIT Tool - Alt Text

[szw151]

Alt Text

I think the UDOIT tool is very helpful. I love that it flags alt text that is the image file name and gives you a U FIX IT button to easily add alt text. What I find frustrating is that the character limit is 100. Most people agree that alt text under 150 characters is fine,and even that is a general guideline, not a law.

What I experienced was UDOIT flagging perfectly good alt text that was over 100 characters, but still a reasonable length, and that is a false result that could be misleading to people who don't know much about alt text. Also it limits (literally) #the usefulness of the U FIX IT functionality when the alt text really needs to be longer than 100 characters.

My suggestion is to change the limit to 140 or 150 characters.

tr_jbates‌ alt text‌

[tr_jbates]

Thanks for the post, Sonya!  I was hoping that we could generate some discussion around this and come up with a good standard value.  In the meantime, I don't see an issue with making it configurable, but I'll keep the default at 100 unless we come to a consensus on a different value.

[szw151]

Jacob, when you say configurable, is this something we can change in our instance now? If so, that is great, but do think the default should be at least 120.

[tr_jbates]

Sorry, I created a feature request for that value to be configurable.  It is not configurable at this time.

I see your point about increasing the default.  From looking around the web, it seems that 125 characters is a pretty common limit.  I can't seem to find our old resource that stated 100 characters, so I'll add to the feature request to also change the default to 125.

Based on your original post, I think it might also be a good idea to change the UFIXIT for ALT text so that it warns the user that they're exceeding the limit, but still allows them to make the change.  What do you (and others) think about that?

[szw151]

Jacob,

I think 125 is a great default setting and changing UFIXIT to warn the user, but still allow the change, is a great solution.

[Chris_Hofer]

Hello tr_jbates...

I would also like to see this limit increased from 100 to something more...like 125 or even 150?  I have been using UDOIT to add alt text to some images in a course I created as a resource for our instructors, and I'm finding that 100 characters isn't enough to describe some of the images I've included (trying to be descriptive as possible).  I, too, also got an error that my "alt" description was over the 100-character length.  @szw151  had suggested 140 or 150.  What about increasing it to 280 (to match Twitter ... ha!) or 300 to round it up?  At this point, I'd be happy with at least 150 characters.

[szw151]

Chris,

I like your suggestion. That works for me as well.

[tr_jbates]

Chris:  What we'll do is make the valuable configurable and set the default to 150.  This value will apply to detecting long ALT text and to adding ALT text through the UFIXIT tool.  I have one of our part-time developers working on it now, and it should be in the next release.

[Boekenoogen]

This is a great tool that we have added to our development. I agree about limiting the number of characters in alt-text. If it is too long it can really cause some confusion.