Hey, everybody. Josh with Online ADA here, and in this video we’re covering article 1.4.5, Images of Text. This is a level AA requirement. I’ll jump into the description.
If the technologies being used can achieve the visual presentation, text is used to convey information rather than images of text, except for the following. Customizable. The image of text can be visually customized by the users requirements and essential. A particular presentation of text is essential to the information being conveyed.
What this means is that, and the whole gist of this article is that, when you are presenting text that’s in an image, whether it’s for a header or some sort of bar graph or content like that, you’re encouraged to instead use CSS to style that header and make it look like the image would have conveyed it, rather than using images of text.
You wanna avoid using images of text whenever you can because that’s actually going to fall into article 1.1.1, which is the alt text. Any image of text is gonna have to have that text represented in its ‘alt’ attribute as well, which is a different article, but it is relevant here as well.
And this is saying if you have to use images of text, then you wanna provide some alternative way of presenting the information. I think this is best represented with a couple of examples. The first one being logos. If your brand has a particular type of font that you don’t necessarily have the license to redistribute, but it’s part of the identity of your logo or brand, then that is actually considered essential, and it is okay to use an image of text in that case.
There are other examples as well. If you are presenting an example of a font type and you don’t actually have, again, the rights to redistribute that font type, you can show, like, a sample or an example of it. Then you can use an image of that text instead to convey what you’re talking about. But this, specifically, is trying to encourage you to use regular font, regular text and just use CSS to duplicate what the image looks like whenever you can.
That will make sure that you are falling in line with this guideline. That’s pretty much all there is to this article. So, thanks for joining me and I’ll see you the next video.