Local elections are held this weekend in Taiwan, where I live. Citizens will vote to elect mayors, councilors and to lower the minimum age for voting from 20 to 18.

In the weeks before election day, Taiwanese citizens receive bulletins (選舉公報) with all the candidates information, alongside with some explanation on the voting process.

These bulletins are huge, and contain, as you might expect, pretty intricate traditional Chinese characters. Stuff that I mostly cannot read.

Reading articles on paper in Chinese is quite difficult for me. Fortunately, all of these bulletins are available online on a dedicated government's website.

Here is, for instance, the bulletin with all the candidates for the Taipei mayor position, in PDF format.

I can easily select parts of the text and translate it using whatever translation tools I have available. Yay!

Except… in their “Political Opinion” section (政見), candidates can provide a text, or, apparently, an image. Sure, once printed out on paper, it all look the same, with the benefit of being able to add the candidate's logo, a QR code, or even a Husky with glasses, because why not!

Needless to say, these image are not accessible at all. I cannot easily select the text inside, and cannot easily translate it. Sure, there are other tools (like OCR) that might help me, but this is a laborious task that does not yield very good results with tiny or slanted Chinese characters mixed with drawings and logos...

Sorry, Lin Bai Xun! Your political propositions look cool, but I cannot decipher them easily!¹

Which brings me to the conclusion: when you publish something, try your best to make sure it is accessible. Provide alternative text descriptions to your images, and if you insist on using images containing text, provide the actual text separately. It will benefit a lot more people than you imagine!