Nontextual

Nontextual is an adjective used to describe content, data, or communication that does not rely primarily on written language. Nontextual material includes images, graphics, sound, video, animations, diagrams, maps, tactile data, icons, and other visual, auditory, or symbolic forms. In information systems, nontextual content is often complemented by metadata or alternate representations to support discovery, accessibility, and processing.

In digital media and publishing, nontextual elements convey information and meaning through imagery, color, layout, and motion. In linguistics or communication studies, nontextual signals encompass prosody, facial expressions, gestures, and other cues that accompany spoken or written language but are not words themselves. In data science and machine learning, nontextual data refer to modalities such as images, audio, video, and sensor data, which can be analyzed independently or combined with text in multimodal models.

Accessibility considerations are central to handling nontextual content. Alt text, captions, transcripts, image descriptions, and structured metadata help users who rely on assistive technology. Standards such as the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) emphasize making nontextual information perceivable and operable.

Challenges include indexing and searching nontextual material, ensuring accurate metadata, and performing reliable recognition or transcription when needed. Technologies such as optical character recognition, computer vision, and audio processing are commonly employed to render nontextual content searchable and interoperable.

See also: multimodal data, accessibility, metadata, image and video processing.