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Hey 👋

My organisation have just switched to Guru for Knowledge Management but one of the key features we’ve used in other software is missing from Guru. 

For screen readers/accessibility, we’ve always been able to use ‘alt tex’ boxes to describe an image so that when a screen reader reaches it, it will read out the text in the alt text box as opposed to reading the filename of the image. 

Is this something that Guru could consider implementing? It’s a blocker to us being able to use Guru Cards for anything other than text at the moment. 

I had thought that a workaround could be writing the ‘alt text’ in the body of the card and then changing the text colour to white so that it isn’t a distraction and will only be encountered by the screen reader - but unfortunately Guru doesn’t support white text on cards (which is understandable given that the default background is white).

We are also heavily involved with accessibility issues and I am not able to find any option for adding the alt text to images. It is a legal requirement now in many of our customers areas of business that online data be made accessible for visually challenged users. I would very strongly request that this be made available!

Hi everyone, 

I’m very happy to share that we have an improvement coming that will allow you to easily add alt text to images using the menu that appears while editing images in a draft. There will be a new button in the menu that opens a text field where you can add the alt text. Here are screenshots from our mockups (note that small changes from these visuals may come during development). 

New button:  

Opens a field for adding alt text: 

 

If you have any existing alt text today from workarounds like markdown, those won’t be affected by this change, you can simply use this going forward if you’d like. We plan to start on this very soon so we can get it to you quickly! Please let me know if you have questions and thank you for sharing your feedback on this with us! 

Open→Scheduled

Hi everyone, 

We have some great news regarding this improvement - it was released last Friday! Now when editing cards in the web app or extension you can easily add alt text to images. Please let us know if you have any questions. Happy editing!

Scheduled→Complete

Is alt text indexed in the search?

Hi @Lynn Miller,

Great question! No, alt text is not indexed for Guru’s search. We’d like to keep the function of alt text focused on providing support for those who need it for accessibility reasons vs some of the ways it gets used in web search SEO. I know there’s a component of how it figures into SEO that encourages adoption, hopefully, the prominent button provides some of the same encouragement for authors who haven’t been thinking about it yet.

 

I forgot to mention this in my earlier post, but in case anyone is looking for general tips about how to write so that content is as accessible as possible we have advice for that! Also, @Homer, our accessibility expert, has specific advice for alt text.

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