You can't put alt text on jargon and call it accessible

If you don't understand a word or phrase that I use, that's okay. To help, some words have definitions at the end of this post. You can tell which ones do because they have a line below them, like this sentence does. They are listed in the order that they appear in the text. If you find this hard to understand, please tell me.

Often, guides on how to be accessible mention only things like alt text, which does not change the presentation of ideas very much. Alt text is important for accessibility. But there is another part that is a lot less common.

That other part is plain language, which is language that is written to be clear and easy to understand. Often you will see something where the author is trying to be accessible. But, because the writing is complicated, it is not very easy to understand. It's good that they're trying. But it would be even better if their writing was easier to understand.

But most of the advice on accessibility online makes it seem like it's just a sticker you put on. It makes it seem like you can leave your text mostly unchanged, and accessibility is just icing on the cake. It's not. Accessibility means making your writing easy for everyone to understand and engage with. That can mean changing the structure of your writing and how you present things.

While I was writing this, I revised it a lot to make it easier to understand. I made the sentences shorter. I tried to avoid using complicated words when I could. I added the glossary. This is not how I write naturally. But how I write naturally is a lot harder to understand. It is filled with complicated sentences. It often uses jargon. Writing that is filled with complicated sentences and jargon is not accessible, even if it uses alt text.

Accessible: Accessible, in this context, means that something is easy to understand.

Alt text: Alt text is a description of an image. People can't see it, but machines can. It's written so people who use screen readers, which read text aloud, can know what's in an image.

Icing on the cake: An expression that means something is added at the end of a process and that it is good.

Jargon: Words that are hard to understand.