What this criterion requires
Use real text rather than pictures of text, except where the presentation is essential (logos) or customizable.
Who it helps
People who need to resize, recolor or re-space text; screen reader users; anyone translating the page.
Example: fails vs passes
<img src="banner-sale.png" alt="Summer sale: 20% off everything this week"><div class="banner"><h2>Summer sale</h2><p>20% off everything this week</p></div>Real text can be resized, recolored, re-spaced and translated; a picture of text cannot.
How to meet and fix it
- Recreate banners and buttons with styled HTML text and web fonts
- Reserve text-in-image for logos and brand marks
Common failures auditors find
- Marketing banners with baked-in copy
- Screenshot-of-a-table instead of a table
Automated scanning catches a share of these instantly - run a free check - and a manual audit covers the judgement calls a tool cannot make.
In PDF documents
A scanned page is one big image of text - the most common PDF accessibility failure. The fix is OCR plus tagging, so the document contains real, selectable text.
Check any document against this and 80+ more automated checks with the free PDF accessibility checker.
- W3C, Understanding 1.4.5: Images of Text - w3.org/WAI
- W3C, How to Meet 1.4.5 (quick reference) - w3.org/WAI/quickref
Last updated . Reviewed by the EqualWeb accessibility team.
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