Today, we’ve launched support for adding Alt Text to Experience Thumbnails!
For those who don’t know - alt text (short for alternative text) is the text that acts as an image description so that people using assistive technologies (such as screen readers) can understand their intent. Because thumbnails often contain text and provide additional information about an experience that is not necessarily reflected by its name or description, it’s a perfect use case for user-generated alt text.
You can add alt text to your experience thumbnails on both the Develop page and while previewing experience thumbnails within Game Settings in Studio.
This feature only works for Experience Thumbnails and not for all uploadable images.
Not only can you add alt text to your experience thumbnails now, but you can also add localized alt text to your localized experience thumbnails! Localized experience thumbnails are inherently different than ones in the base language, so alt text is not automatically translated. You can add alt text to your localized experience thumbnails in the Translator Portal.
We have updated the Promotional Thumbnails article to include best practices for writing alt text. Here are some quick notes:
Avoid redundant text like “Image of” or “Picture of” before the description.
Include any text shown in your thumbnail.
Always describe the specific thumbnail, not your experience generally.
Keep it concise.
If you’re wondering “Why should I add alt text to my thumbnails?”, there are several reasons! The main one is to ensure any information about your experience is accessible to everyone. But an excellent side effect of writing alt text is - when you’re forced to think about the meaning behind an image, you may realize it’s not as clear as you thought it was and go back to the drawing board. You will likely end up with a thumbnail that clearly conveys your intended meaning.
Big thanks to @TheNicell for all his work on this project . As always, if you find any bugs, have any feedback, or want to ask any questions, please do so in the comments below!
If you’re inspired to learn more about accessibility and what you can do to make your experiences accessible, please check out our Accessibility Best Practices article.
Nope, since translated thumbnails don’t map 1:1 to thumbnails in the source language, auto translation will not apply at all. Though we are considering using OCR to detect any text in thumbnails to help kick-start or advise alt text writing.
It’s amazing to see another step towards accessibility for both users who are visually impaired and people who might not understand English as well. Thanks for this amazing update and I hope that people will use it en masse!
Great update! I have a quick question though. Will this be used as a way when searching for games as well?
Like searching for “Survive” and since one of the game’s thumbnail says Survive, then the game will appear. (If it was mentioned in the original post my apologies since I didn’t find it)
This is a really great update in terms of accessibility! It’s awesome to know that Roblox is focusing on making games more accessible to a wider audience. While I don’t have any disabilities myself, I know some of my friends who do who can’t enjoy games as much as they would
This is a bright step in the future and I hope we receive more accessibility updates like this so us developers can make our games more accessible in the future!
Will there be customizable options in the future? Such as changing the rotation, size, positioning and the font of your text if that’s already not an option? I can’t quite tell how customizable this is currently since it looks like it does everything automatically but being able to manipulate the text to our preference would be a neat feature!
This feature is really great for localization, and people can actually see what your thumbnails are trying to promote, and another way to give information to the player.
. As always, if you find any bugs, have any feedback, or want to ask any questions, please do so in the comments below!