Number go up
When I was talking to a client recently, I was surprised to learn how incredibly motivated she was to write all the alt texts ❶ for images on her site. I’m used to spending quite a lot of time convincing, explaining, sometimes begging, so that was cool.
Talking to her some more, I realised Alter, my plugin for reviewing alt texts in the Kirby Panel, has something to do with it. In the plugin’s view, you can see the number of images with alt texts and that indicator turns green when all of them have one:
That’s it. Turning it green motivated her!
Well, she didn’t actually mention the colour, it was more the incomplete number itself. In fact she was mostly complaining about a certain coworker who keeps uploading new images without alt text, removing this “success” state of hers.
After hanging up I did some research and there’s a name for it. The goal gradient effect: “The tendency to approach a goal increases with proximity to the goal”. I can definitely relate to this.
I’m currently in the process of building a Kirby view for Editoria11y, so I went all in to this newfound UX finding. Instead of, what I initially did, showing “pages with alerts” I’m now displaying a growing number of “pages without alerts” and a clear goal. With some juice ❷ even:
Alternative text description of the video
A “Pages without alerts” stat counts up like an odometer, from 42 of 50, to 50 of 50, and its icon turns into a green check.
Initially I also turned the whole thing green. The stats card is a bit too big for that, a comically big “success” so to say. But I’m pretty sure it triggers the same effect with just a green checkmark icon.
As I’m currently updating all of my plugins to Kirby 6, I sneaked this odometer animation into the latest release candidate for Kirby Alter, too.
Now I don’t think such design engineering in the backend can solve web accessibility, I’m not that naïve. It might even lead to editors writing bad alt text just to make the number go up. We still have to educate editors, but it surely doesn’t hurt giving them a bit of dopamine when they’re doing something right.
- Alt text is what screen readers read when they announce an image. It’s not only for blind people: many people with low vision can tell there’s an image, but not its contents. ↩︎
- A term in game design for the feedback that makes an action feel good. I’m primarily thinking of Balatro here. No, I’m not going to add sounds to the plugin. I think. Maybe? ↩︎