Accessibility Toolkit for Open Educational Resources (OER): ASCII art Accessibility

• Before graphics became widely used on the internet, ASCII characters were used to form pictures or graphs.
• ASCII art is still often used on social media to make topical memes.
• ASCII art is about making text pictures with text symbols.
• Unfortunately, ASCII art is not accessible. It very confusing to people who access the internet using screen readers unless you take some additional steps.

How to create accessible ASCII art

If you cannot avoid using ASCII art, follow these steps to make them accessible

• create or copy/paste the ASCII art
• take screen shot/ create picture of the ASCII art
• add alt-text to the image describing the ASCII art
• post the image with the alt-text to make the ASCII art accessible.

Demonstration/Comparison

Other examples of inaccessible ASCII art