Copilot: Your Key to More Accessible Content!

Create compelling and descriptive alternative text with Free Copilot

Reading time: About 5 minutes

I try hard to make sure that content I create is welcoming and useful to everyone. When I’m helping members of the Your 365 Coach community look at SharePoint pages or other digital assets, accessibility is a number one priority in the design process.

Making content accessible means designing and creating content that can be accessed, understood, and enjoyed by everyone, natively or with assistive technologies. This helps us reach wider and more diverse audiences, enhances reputation and trust, and improves overall quality and usability experiences.

Microsoft 365 has some great accessibility tools built in, including what I’m going to talk about today, alternative text descriptions for images or ‘Alt text’ for short.

What is Alt text?

Alt text is a brief description of an image that helps people who cannot see some or all of it to understand its content and context. It is used by screen reading software on the user’s device.

I’m sure you will have seen the space for this when you’ve added an image to SharePoint, PowerPoint or similar. Sadly, too often it’s left blank.

Thinking what to say

Luckily many software and online solutions will now provide you with a suggested Alt text but do please check it before you accept it! (I’ve often spotted misgendering and once a person in a tuxedo referred to as a cat!)

Although I’m an advocate of using Alt text, I admit I can sometimes find it hard to know what to write, particularly using language that describes the image. After all, they do say a picture paints a thousand words. This small but important task can slow me down.

Recently, for locations when I’m not provided with a suggested text that I can enrich, I’ve been asking Free Copilot to help me.

Using Copilot to create Alt text

Here’s a couple of examples of using Copilot to generate Alt text. For both examples I logged into my work or school account in the browser version of Copilot at copilot.microsoft.com but I’ve got similar results from the Edge side panel and Copilot in Windows too.

For both I used the snipping tool to grab the images to the clipboard and pasted them directly into the Copilot chat, but you can also use the Copilot screenshot or upload them too if they are small sized.

Example 1

Here’s a blog title card that I’d use in our website or social media.

The prompt I used was “Write a website alternative text description for this image that can be used by screen reading software. The person is called Matthew and his pronouns are he/him”

I need to provide the context of who I am and my pronouns to help Copilot generate create a more detailed response.

The response was “Matthew, wearing a checkered shirt, stands on the right side of the image with his face blurred for privacy. On the left side, there is text that reads ‘PLAN AHEAD FOR A GREAT SHAREPOINT INTRANET’ in white capital letters against a gradient teal background. Below the text, there is a SharePoint logo consisting of four interlocking blue squares forming an ‘S’ shape”

Overall, I thought this was a pretty good response and far more detailed than I would have used on my own. I edited the bit about my face being blurred, which to be fair to Copilot it is. I’ve experimented trying to create a prompt that asks Copilot to not refer to privacy features, but I’ve found that makes the overall response lower quality or feel too corporate.

Let me know if you’ve had any more luck!

Example 2

This is an image that I was going to use in some web content about holiday locations

The prompt I used was “Write a website alternative text that can be used by screen reading software, the city in the background is Jamesville, the image is included to give an example of a beach vacation.”

Copilot suggested “Image showcasing a serene beachfront at twilight with a row of tall palm trees in the foreground, leading the eye towards the distant skyline of Jamesville. The calm waters reflect the city lights, and a wooden pier is visible to the left, all setting an inviting scene for a beach vacation.”

Doesn’t that sound gorgeous? This certainly creates a picture in your mind, if I’d have done this alone, I would have missed the pier (only spotted after Copilot mentioned it, although I think, I would call that the right). I would have given up at something like “A row of palm trees beside and beach and riverfront, office buildings are in the background over the water”

In summary

While adding alternative text doesn’t seem like it should take too long, added to the time used to source imagery and the multiple images used, I found that using Copilot speeds up the process. However, more importantly I’d concede that the descriptions Copilot provides are more detailed and engaging than the bland alternatives that I’d offer in my rush to get something published, so Copilot is helping me improve my work quality here too.

Can Copilot do more for you?

I hope you find this thought provoking. At Your 365 Coach we’re looking to help more people help themselves today with the Free Copilot that comes with your Microsoft 365 licence, check out our new on-demand learning course Microsoft Copilot with Enterprise Data Protection packed with seven modules of Copilot creativeness!

Let me know how you’re using Copilot to provide richer content experiences. I'd love to find out.

Matthew

Matthew Burrell is a consultant at Your 365 Coach

Published 8 August 2024

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