Internal links for long descriptions

#1

Hi, all, I am pretty new to Pressbooks and I am struggling with creating the internal links that would help me add long descriptions for images that need it (graphs and tables with information that isn’t offered in any other form than the image itself.) It might be something very simple that I fail to grasp so I hope someone can explain to me how I can add a link to figures from main body text and vice versa.
I am not a web designer, I am just a remediator but I have a pretty good understanding of WordPress. I have read all the resources I could find online on the matter but I seem to have a problem in identifying the caption ID. Most of the images in my book do not have a caption ID, they look like this:

[caption id="" align=“aligncenter” width=“480”]Electricity Generation by Nuclear Power Figure 4[/caption]

Now, can anybody please give me an example of how I could create a link from this particular picture to the description I created in the long descriptions section?
Thank you very much!

#2

Hi @Andreea and welcome to the Pressbooks community! I’m guessing you’re referring to section on long descriptions in the Accessibility guide from our friends at BCcampus? If that’s the case, it sounds to me that what you’re looking to do is to create internal links that point to each other within a chapter. One way to do this is by using the anchor button in the WYWISYG editor and the instructions given in our guide (look for the section called creating custom internal links). This may not be a good suggestion, but the footnote tool also creates internal links automatically – there may well be a good accessibility/semantic web reason NOT to use footnotes for long descriptions that I’m not aware of, but it’d be a quick and easy way to create a set of matching internal links like those described in the BCcampus guide.

If that’s missing the mark, maybe @jgray (from BCcampus) would have some insight? Another likely knower of things in the a11y world is @Naomi_Salmon, who’s written a good Pressbooks ideas ticket to help make this whole process smoother for people like you.

#3

Hi @Andreea

In the Accessibility Toolkit, I talk about using the caption ID to link back to an image. But you’re right, it’s really not easy to find and I will be revising the chapter in the future with an easier solution.

As @SteelWagstaff mentioned, an easier method is to link to anchors and forget the caption ID. You can place an anchor tag at the beginning of your long description and another one right before your image in order to navigate back to the correct spot in the chapter. I wouldn’t recommend using the footnote feature because it is not expected behaviour for long descriptions.

Here is a video demonstrating how to add internal links with anchor tags: https://video.bccampus.ca/media/How+to+Insert+Internal+Links+with+Anchor+Tags/0_nthliec8

Let me know if you have more questions/need clarification on anything.

#4

Thank you all, your answers were really helpful! Thanks for the further reading links, too. I appreciate it! I managed to understand what I was missing.

#5

So glad to hear it. And thank you @jgray for filling in the gaps in my own understanding! I’m grateful to be learning more about accessibility best practices from people like you.