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In Touch: Alt-Text in News; Goalball Saved My Life

Alt-Text in News; Goalball Saved My Life

BBC Radio 4 - In Touch, Alt-Text in News; Goalball Saved My Life

The BBC has published new guidance and training for journalists on Alt-Text.

The BBC has produced mandatory training and guidance for journalists on how to use Alt-Text. Gareth Mainwaring from west Wales tells In Touch how Goalball changed his life.

Alt-Text is an image description for those who use screen readers. It is an important accessibility tool that is often misused or is missing entirely, impacting on visually impaired people's experiences when consuming online content. The BBC's Johny Cassidy was instrumental in creating new mandatory training and guidance for journalists so that they can consider and begin to implement meaningful descriptions of images, graphs, maps and graphics etc in the content that they create. The guidance is also available for journalists and content creators outside of the BBC. Johny describes why and how this all came about and Holly Tuke, a visually impaired blogger and content creator, describes how important Alt-Text is to her online experience.

Gareth Mainwaring is from West Wales and has recently discovered goalball. It is a sport designed specifically for people with visual impairments and it has had a profound impact on Gareth's life. He and his mum Helen describe how the sport, as well as making Gareth more active, has created more opportunities. 

If you are interested in getting involved in goalball, you can find details of Goalball UK's taster sessions via the following link: https://goalballuk.com/the-sport/taster-sessions/


Presenter: Peter White
Producer: Fern Lulham 
Production Coordinator: David Baguley 
Website image description: Peter White sits smiling in the centre of the image and he is wearing a dark green jumper. Above Peter's head is the BBC logo (three separate white squares house each of the three letters). Bottom centre and overlaying the image are the words "In Touch" and the Radio 4 logo (the word Radio in a bold white font, with the number 4 inside a white circle). The background is a bright mid-blue with two rectangles angled diagonally to the right. Both are behind Peter, one is a darker blue and the other is a lighter blue.

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