Tonight in Ad-hoc Accessibility Testing.

Recently a lovely couple RantWoman knows celebrated their 40th wedding anniversary. They invited people from many strands of their lives to a wonderful celebration in Lincoln Park.

Tonight comes an email via Evite about 10 new pictures posted to the invitation.

RantWoman uses software to blow things up, er screen enlargement software. RantWoman can see the pictures are a joy. Some of them have text labels. NONE of them have nice descriptive filenames. So the screen reader reads something like Image23426956959432828 or something similar.

RantWoman does not blame her friends for this problem. RantWoman blames the technology and will hereby enter Make it So mode unencumbered by precise knowledge of how to accomplish what she has in mind.  Evite and probably a lot of other portals that let people upload files should make it easy for people to rename to something more descriptive and / or to add their own alt text for a description.

In the absence of descriptions on most of the photos, RantWoman and Chrome have the option of letting Google supply a description. Google did not come up with any descriptions. RantWoman thinks that might be just as well: RantWoman would be a little bit creeped out if Google matched the images in the EVite with actual images in some vast database. In fact, even though there probably are images of RantWoman in many places all over the internet, RantWoman would LOVE some kind of opt-in option about how images get shared or matched with each other.

But for now, RantWoman will enjoy some photos--and being able to see enough to appreciate--even though she has no idea who is in some of them!