By using VAST, you can learn how to add accessibility tags for screen readers to your PDFs, by using Adobe InDesign and Adobe Acrobat.

I'm super excited to release a brand new publishing community resource: VAST (or Visual Accessibility Skills Toolkit).

>> WWW.VAST.GUIDE <<

VAST is a collection of short articles aiming to spread awareness about what visual impairments are, and how folks in the small press industry can accommodate them.

The guides are split into four sections:

Visual Impairment 101 explores what visual impairments are, how visually impaired people navigate digital content, and introduces some current language and definitions (circa 2023).

Screen reading PDFs explores the basics of how screen readers navigate through digital content. Includes video examples!

Using InDesign introduces different tools that designers can use to make their documents more accessible.

Putting Into Practice presents case studies of common structures in roleplaying games, and how they could be given accessibility tags using tools covered in section 3. (Coming soon!)

VAST was developed by Brian Tyrrell (me!), and disability advocate and accessibility consultant Yubi Coates. Visually impaired consultants and InDesign experts were brought in to corroborate the guides.

All of the information in the guides is up to date, and we’re committed to reviewing and updating the guides in 2024 and 2025.

This project was completed using a small pot of funding provided by Creative Scotland’s Create: Inclusion program in 2022.

Solution: a piece of one of these

with a couple of bumps hammered in with a scratch awl. Subtle, non-damaging, versatile.

first I'll explain the changes for anyone who is new or who uses desktop because I'm fairly certain it's different there.

before when you were scrolling on your feed and you tapped on a picture to view it, if there was a margin around the picture it was black. if you double tapped the picture, it would zoom in. you could do this twice and the third time would return it to normal zoom. if you scrolled up or down, it would close the image and put you where you were on your feed before opening the image. if you scrolled to the sides, it would scroll through any other images that were on the same post.

now when you open the image, the margins are filled with a zoomed, cropped, and blurred section of the image. when you double tap, it likes and zooming is difficult. when you swipe up, it gives you a different post, generated by an algorithm to be similar. if you scroll to the side, it brings you to the posters blog. both of the swipe functions also do this when you are zoomed in as well.

i can only speak to my own accessability needs, but there are several and i know i can't be alone in any of them. for context the relevant things are that i have low vision which requires high contrast and photosensitive migraines which require low brightness. as you can imagine, this is a very specific balance of things that is easily made difficult.

firstly, the background of the image. i used to open the image specifically because of the background. increasing the contrast around the edge of the image and removing irrelevant details made it significantly easier to see. there were frequently posts that i straight up couldn't see properly until i opened them. with the new background feature, images that i have opened are impossible to see clearly. i can barely tell where the actual image is and where the background is. i functionally understand the aesthetic value of the change but there are regularly posts that i straight up can't see anymore because of this. there should be an option for high contrast backgrounds available so that people who need it can still have it.

next is the zoom. the double tap to zoom was one of my favorite features. because when something was small or hard to see it was easy to make it visible and i didn't have to change how i was holding my phone. now if i need to zoom, i have to shift and the pinch to zoom is very buggy. it is difficult to get the zoom where i need it on the image and it regularly causes glitches that alter the image. and i have to zoom out and back in to move when i am zoomed in to or else the new swipe features engage. this is hard on my eyes and hard on my hands that have fucked up joints because it requires a lot more small repetitive motions to do the same thing. this change seems to be mostly conformist to be more like other sites which is disappointing for the hellsite, bit it could easily be made at least accessable if there were an option to have the double tap zoom or even if the bugs on the pinch zoom were fixed.

lastly is the swipe feature. while this is mechanically and aesthetically obnoxious to me i will hold my focus on accessability. it interacts very poorly with the zoom feature, making it hard to navigate the image viewer when zooming is needed. from a dexterity standpoint, it also makes it more difficult to see what i want to see. if my hands a shaking i will sometimes open an image and get an entirely different one because of the algorithm swipe. I've had to scroll back up to three times to get what i actually clicked on because the swipe function is so sensitive and buggy. it is also more difficult to close the image. i often have to give it multiple attempts to close the image because when i swipe down, it doesn't go away and i can't get my back button to come up without it going to a new post. the bugs should be fixed and it needs some mechanical fixes, but this should also be made optional.

disclaimer: This is mostly a reference for myself for the image descriptions I write in the future, including common things I see that I want to avoid. Some are with screenreader users in mind, some are with non-screenreader users in mind. I’m not claiming this is where describing images should begin or end, and i’m not the only low vision person out there. if you want to have better reference guides, i find here to be helpful.

Image description in alt text: Not all people who need image descriptions can or do use screenreaders. Alt text is hard to access without a screenreader on most browsers and versions of the app. Just put it in the post. If you don’t, it’s just showing that you don’t actually care about accessibility.

Image description under a read more, in a reblog, in small print, etc: This is a big one, and I’ve seen a ton of posts about it, but it can’t hurt to restate. This is inaccessible, and shows that your “accessibility” is performative. If the image description is under a readmore, if anything happens to your blog, then it will no longer be accessible. If a description is long, that’s ok. Just tag the post as long instead of using a read more. If you post art (or anything) with an image description in the reblog, people will have to go searching through the replies for it. It also makes it easy to separate the ID from the rest of the post. If the description is in small print, or otherwise formatted not in plain text, it’s inaccessible. Not all people who need image descriptions use screenreaders.

Put the most important info first: This is so someone can skip the screenreader to the next paragraph once they get the idea of the post.

“Image ID”: ID stands for “image description.” It is a common misconception that ID in this context means “identification” instead.

Capitalization (id vs ID): Maybe you’re going for aesthetics, or maybe you don’t capitalize letters very often. Keep in mind that screenreaders tend to read “id” (lowercase) as a word, like Freudian psychoanalysis, while “ID” (uppercase) is read as the individual letters. Hopefully you’re aiming for the individual letters, since that’s what Image Description is short for in this context.

Bold, Italicized, and Strikethrough text: I don’t know about others, but the screenreader I use doesn’t tell you which text is bold, italics, or strikethrough. If that is in any way relevant to understanding text in the image you’re describing, please specify what sections are bold. Example of how to do that: The text says: “My favorite color is green.” The word green is bolded.

Colored text: Similar to the above, colored text on Tumblr is not registered as different than plain text with a screenreader. It would be helpful if you made a note of colored text. You can use the same format I specified above.

Colored text, the sequel: Provide plain text when you‘re making posts that use colored text. Some people don’t use screenreaders, and they don’t need to justify that for you to make your posts accessible to them. Colored text on its own is inaccessible because it simply cannot be seen well by some people.

Video descriptions: Don’t separate video and audio descriptions. I don’t understand why this would make sense to anybody to do, but I’ve seen people do it regardless. In most videos, the audio and video are relevant to each other, and separating them makes it really confusing. I know it seems obvious, but think: is the content of the video actually understandable given the description you’ve provided?

Note when the image description is done, in a way that can be understood with or without a screenreader: The commonly used square bracket ] is not sufficient, because screenreaders do not read them aloud. Doing this well is most commonly achieved by putting “End ID” at the end of the description.

Update for One Breath Left!

I've added bookmarks and accessibility tags to the three main booklets, including alt text and articles.