How to Fix Missing Alt Text in Rise 360

Overview

Without alt text, a screen reader announces an image as just "image," or reads its filename aloud, both meaningless to the learner. On the flip side, if every decorative icon and background graphic gets read aloud too, the course becomes exhausting to listen to. The fix is the same either way: tell Rise what the image actually is.

Step-by-step instructions

1. 1

   Click the image block to select it.

2. 2

   Open the block's settings.

3. 3

   Find the alt text field.

4. 4

   Ask yourself: does this image add information, or is it just decoration?

5. 5

   If it adds information, type a description of what it communicates, not what it looks like.

6. 6

   If it's purely decorative, mark it decorative so Rise skips it for screen readers.

7. 7

   Repeat for every image block in the lesson.

Screenshots

Tips

• Write alt text the way you'd describe the image over the phone to someone who can't see it, specific enough to be useful, short enough to not be a paragraph.
• If you're describing a chart or graph, describe the takeaway, not just the chart type. "Bar chart showing a 20% increase in customer satisfaction" is far more useful than "bar chart."
• When in doubt about whether something is decorative, ask whether removing it would change what the learner understands. If not, it's decorative.

Common mistakes

• Leaving alt text blank, or using the filename as alt text, "quarterly-chart-final-v3.png" tells a screen reader user nothing.
• Marking a genuinely informative image as decorative because it was faster than writing a real description.
• Writing alt text for the image block itself but forgetting images used as background fills or inside other block types.

Why it matters

People using a screen reader won't know what this image shows.