The deadline to meet the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1 Level AA standard is late April 2026.
Thanks to PreTeXt (the authoring platform in which our books are written), the text in Active Prelude, Active Calculus, and Active Multi already meet these guidelines. Recently, several of us have been working to ensure that the images in these texts also meet the guidelines. As an aside: alt-text by itself has limitations, including that screenreader users cannot pause or back up within alt-text, and alt-text cannot have math marked up properly to be read by MathJax. Thus, we are using detailed image descriptions which are accompanied behind the scenes by alt-text that directs readers using screenreader technology to the detailed image description.
The short version of compliance: all of the images other than those in WeBWorK exercises now have alt-text. Several of us are working to develop full and complete image descriptions beyond the perfunctory ones we created initially to meet compliance standards. Several people are also working on included WeBWorK exercises that have images to ensure those have image descriptions as well, and we expect those to be complete by late April.
I’m grateful to everyone involved in figuring out a plan, providing support with various technical details, and/or writing alt-text for images: Mitch Keller, Oscar Levin, Chrissy Safranski, David Austin, and Mercredi Chasman.
If you want to know more about how these appear in the text and/or to know more about the current state of progress on full and complete image descriptions and/or images in WeBWorK exercises, the rest of this post is devoted to those two issues.
You can find a small circled “i” at the bottom left of each figure, such as here:
Clicking on the circled “i”, you see
In an activated WeBWorK exercise with an image, you’ll see a small button that says “image description”, and clicking that will similarly expand the description:
Here’s a summary of work that’s completed for Active Calculus Single:
+ Chapters 5, 6,7, 8 have all images with detailed image descriptions, and the images in Chapter 1 are in progress; the rest of Chapter 1 and Chapters 2, 3, and 4 will be finished by late April
+ Chapters 1, 2, 3, and 8 have all WeBWorK images with competed alt-text, and the other chapters are in progress
Active Prelude and Active Multi now both pass the compliance tests for everything except certain WeBWorK exercises, and work is planned to have all of the needed image descriptions in place by late April.
