Accessibility

INFORMS is committed to providing an environment that encourages and supports equal opportunity, free expression, freedom from discrimination, harassment and retaliation, full participation in all activities and leadership, and collaboration among people of different backgrounds.

In our continuing effort to promote inclusivity, INFORMS is committed to improving the accessibility of our articles for anyone who might seek to use them. We ask that our authors assist with this goal by providing alt text for all figures and tables to make their work more accessible to those who are visually impaired.

What Is Alt Text?

Alt text (short for alternative text) is an attribute used in the HTML code of a web page to describe the appearance and function of non-text content on the page. (Hereafter, we will use the term “image” as a proxy for all non-text content.) Alt text is meant to convey the “why” of an image as it relates to the content of a webpage, and can be read aloud to users by screen reader software.

By providing alt text, authors are opening their works to an even bigger audience to engage with their material. For visually impaired users, alt text allows them to understand fully the pictures and graphs included in your paper. This is especially important for papers that include a lot of visually dense figures and data.

Tips for Writing Alt Text

When determining appropriate alternative text for non-text content, context is everything.

What information does the image convey? Is the image presented to provide a general understanding of a concept, identify details of components or parts, or introduce specific data to be compared, reported, or used in understanding the concept?

Avoid redundancy. Do not repeat the information that you have already covered in your paper in the context of the image (i.e., don’t use the figure caption that will appear with the image). If you plan to use your keywords, do so sparingly – keyword stuffing is not an appropriate use of alt text and can have a negative impact on search engine page ranking.

Do not include “image of”, “picture of”, etc. in your alt text. Alt text already is assumed to be referring to an image.

Keep it short and descriptive. Most screen readers cut off alt text at 125 characters, so try to keep it below that count.

Additional Resources

• WebAIM: https://webaim.org/techniques/alttext/
• Diagram Center: http://diagramcenter.org/making-images-accessible.html
• Understanding WCAG 2.0: Non-text Content: https://www.w3.org/TR/UNDERSTANDING-WCAG20/text-equiv-all.html

How to Provide Alt Text with Your Submission

For those using Microsoft Word:

To come.

If writing in LaTex:

LaTeX users can use the command \Description[<short description>]{<long description>} inside every figure, teaserfigure, marginfigure, or table environment to provide a description of the image(s) used in the figure. Unlike \caption, which is used alongside the image, \Description is intended to be used instead of the image, for example:

\begin{figure}
  \centering
  \includegraphics{voltage}
  \Description[A bell-like histogram]{A bell-like histogram centered at $0.5$~V with most measurements between $0.2$~V and $0.8$~V}
  \caption{Histogram of the measurements of voltage}
  \label{fig:voltage}
\end{figure}

Not providing a Description will generate a warning at compilation.

Updated April 16, 2021