Accessible digital images: AltText guidelines for authors and museum professionals

Abstract

With this issue, Curator: The Museum Journal has now implemented a policy requiring that all images contained in manuscripts published in our journal will require AltText descriptions in the main manuscript. The format for these descriptions should appear after figure location recommendations and figure captions in the main manuscript, indicated by capturing the beginning and end of the text with specific code for the typesetting team, and highlighting all text to be included in the HTML file in a red highlight as follows:

<alt text>Statue of Lincoln</alt text>

The guidelines for developing AltText can be found on the journal's Author Guidelines <https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/page/journal/21516952/homepage/forauthors.html> section of the website. This editorial provides a short description of the work that led to this new policy, the principles of access and inclusion that support this new policy, and offers detailed guidelines for authors to support their development of manuscripts.