Building the Habit of Authoring Alt Text: Design for Making a Change
Open accessAbstract
Alternative (alt) text is essential for the accessibility of images to screen reader users. Alt text can be authored by end users or generated automatically using machine learning. Automated methods, while fast and cheap, do not result in high quality alt text. Meanwhile, the large number of images with no alt text on social media indicates that many users do not author alt text for the images they upload. Little is known about whether design elements that motivate and support users are integrated into alt text user interfaces (UIs). We reviewed the current state of alt text UIs in literature, and characterized their design according to behavior change and accountability design factors. We found that the majority of reviewed UIs contained general prompts with no specific motivator or guidance. Many of the UIs did not incorporate design elements to encourage accountability or behavior change. We recommend that future alt text authoring tools incorporate design elements which decrease the user’s cognitive effort, employ motivational and well-timed triggers, and leverage user accountability through alt text visibility and its association with the user’s social presence.
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Most research in this space has focused on content creators or domain experts who author their figures.
“Most research in this space has focused on content creators or domain experts who author their figures [4, 26, 48, 71].”
From How University Disability Services Professionals Write Image Descriptions for HCI Figures Using Generative AI (2026) · cites this paper as [4]
Section 4.1 describes one reviewed paper involving an expert annotator and three UIs in which users authored alt text for personal photos. Sections 3.2 and 5 discuss a review of alt-text tools, but do not establish that most research focuses on content creators or domain experts authoring their own figures. Our copy does not address that claimed predominance. (LLM, conf=0.72)
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- Authors
- Bellscheidt, S., Metcalf, H., Pham, D., & Elglaly, Y. N.
- Affiliations
- Western Washington University (US)
- Venue
- The 25th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility
- Publisher
- ACM
- Published
- 2023-10-22
- Pages
- 1-5
- OpenAlex
- W4387793240
- Cited by
- 8
- References
- 23
- Citations by year
- 2026: 1 · 2025: 5 · 2024: 2
- FWCI
- 3.35
- Type
- conference paper
- Language
- en
- Open access
- bronze
- doi.org
- Locations
- International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (ASSETS) (publishedVersion)
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Human Factors and Ergonomics › Digital Accessibility for Disabilities
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Human-Computer Interaction › Usability and User Interface Design
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Human-Computer Interaction › Innovative Human-Technology Interaction
- Keywords
- alt text, image accessibility, screen readers, user motivation, social media images, cognitive effort, user interface design
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