Adding Alt Text

At Permanent, our mission is to preserve and provide perpetual access to the digital legacy of all people for the historical and educational benefit of future generations. Because of this mission, we hope to ensure that all people can access these histories so they can learn and grow from them. This involves ensuring that our material is accessible to all people, including those who use assistive devices like screen readers to navigate Permanent. That's why we added an alt text field as a metadata field for all files on Permanent.org.

Alt text is alternative text used by those who may not be able to visually see a file on Permanent.org on the screen. It is meant to visually describe the image, video, or file. The alt text field is a standardized field that can be accessed by screen reading devices to audibly read the information in the field to the user. Adding alt text to your files is important and helps us to ensure that everyone can access materials on Permanent.org.

By default, the alt text field for each file is filled with the name or title of the file, so that the alt text field is never blank. It's important to edit the information in the field so it is more descriptive. You can think of it like trying to describe the file to someone over the phone who cannot see the file itself. There are no character limits to the alt description. 

You can change the alt text of a file by clicking in the field box under Alt Text in the metadata tab. Type your description, then click Save.

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If you delete all the text from the alt text field, it will revert back to the name or title of the file. 

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