Astronomy – describing images from the James Webb telescope

As you may remember, on July 12 NASA, ESA and CSA released the new famous first five images taken by the James Webb Space Telescope, making the newspaper front pages all around the world.

What could be less known is that the images feature also a visual description so that people with visual impairments could understand the image contents. The initiative is described in more details in this article by the Washington Post: https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/07/20/nasa-images-accessible-text/

The gallery of images is available at this link: https://webbtelescope.org/news/first-images/gallery. From there you can open one page for each of the five images, where you can find the selected image along with its scientific description; on the same page, on the bottom left, there is a link labelled “Text description” that will open a PDF with the visual description.

If you have feedback or suggestions about these descriptions please write to IAU-InclusiveOutreach@uai.it

IAU Inclusive Outreach (Inspiring Stars) subWorkgroup