Position paper: Accessible image file formats - The need and the way

Accessibility is one of the key checkpoints in all software's products, applications & websites. Accessibility with digital images has always been a major challenge for the industry. Images form an integral part of certain type of documents & most of the Web 2.0 compliant websites. Audience challenged with blindness and many dyslexics only makes use of screen readers/ text readers/narrator software programs to access the computer and computer displayed information. Such audience cannot view digital images/pictures. Hence drafting accessible documents or designing accessibility enhanced websites containing digital images representing figures, diagrams, map, snaps etc is a challenges. There are various published best practices for accessibility of documents or website containing images so that they can be better understood by the visually impaired users. But these are truly not enough to cover all kind of practical scenarios and this paper positions a need for a more innovative solutions. The paper also proposes accessibility enhanced image formation technique with relevant modification required in screen readers/narrator software programs and positions its edge over the existing methods. Copyright 2007 ACM.