Accessible Event Photo Galleries: The Guests You Are Currently Losing
TIME&SPACE · Organiser's Playbook
A photo gallery that only works for sighted users with steady hands and fast data excludes a real share of your guests. Most of the fixes are small.
Accessible Event Photo Galleries: The Guests You Are Currently Losing
In short: Photo galleries are built by people with good eyesight on fast connections, and it shows. Contrast, tap targets, alt text and file weight are the four things that decide whether a large minority of your guests can use the gallery at all.
Accessibility in event photography gets treated as a legal box. It is more usefully treated as a delivery problem: some proportion of your guests currently cannot get their photographs, and you are unlikely to hear about it, because people who cannot use something rarely write in to say so.
Contrast, and the dark gallery problem
Event galleries are almost always dark, because dark backgrounds make photographs look good. That is a real design reason and it is worth keeping.
What it must not do is drag the text down with it. Captions, buttons and download links need to stay legible against that dark ground. If your brand colours are configurable, check the combination a guest actually sees rather than the one in the design file, because an organiser can pick a background that ruins the contrast of everything on top of it.
Tap targets on a phone, at an event
Almost every guest opens the gallery on a phone, standing up, one handed, sometimes in the dark and sometimes after a drink. Small controls fail under those conditions for everyone, not only for people with motor impairments.
Make the download and share controls large and far enough apart that a mis-tap does not do something else. This is the single cheapest improvement available.
Alt text that says something
Automatic alt text on an event photo tends to produce "a group of people". That is technically a description and practically useless.
Where you can, say what the photograph is of in the terms the event uses: the main stage at sunset, the awards table, the queue at the entrance. A screen reader user is trying to decide whether to download it, same as everyone else.
Weight, because data is not free
A gallery that assumes fast broadband fails at a rural venue, on a crowded festival network, or for a guest on a limited plan. Serve a properly sized thumbnail, not a full resolution file scaled down in the browser, and let people choose when to pull the large version.
That is good for accessibility and it is good for everybody. Most delivery problems at events are bandwidth problems wearing a different hat.
Founder, TIME&SPACE