Accessibility and alt Attributes
The alt attribute is important for a number of reasons: it describes an image for screen readers used by those without sight or poor sight, it describes the image to bots, and it provides an indicator of what should have loaded if the image fails to load at all. But what about the case where the image doesn't have much value to be read, because it has accompanying positioned text offscreen?
Don't omit the the alt attribute -- the screen read will read out the image's src attribute. Gross. Instead include the alt attribute with an empty value:
<img src="/path/to/image.png" alt="" />
No image alt or src text is read and you're golden!
![Convert XML to JSON with JavaScript]()
If you follow me on Twitter, you know that I've been working on a super top secret mobile application using Appcelerator Titanium. The experience has been great: using JavaScript to create easy to write, easy to test, native mobile apps has been fun. My...
![CSS Filters]()
CSS filter support recently landed within WebKit nightlies. CSS filters provide a method for modifying the rendering of a basic DOM element, image, or video. CSS filters allow for blurring, warping, and modifying the color intensity of elements. Let's have...
![MooTools onLoad SmoothScrolling]()
SmoothScroll is a fantastic MooTools plugin but smooth scrolling only occurs when the anchor is on the same page. Making SmoothScroll work across pages is as easy as a few extra line of MooTools and a querystring variable.
The MooTools / PHP
Of course, this is a...
![CSS Columns]()
One major gripe that we've always had about CSS is that creating layouts seems to be more difficult than it should be. We have, of course, adapted and mastered the techniques for creating layouts, but there's no shaking the feeling that there should be a...
Really good! I added a sniping code to my editor to remember the alt attribute. Other attributes very important are the following:
I’m from Brazil and these tags are really important for softwares that reads screens.
Definitely in agreement with this. When I studied Software Engineering at university we had a module on human-computer interaction and part of it included making your website accessible to those with poor vision.
Now I always try to have a high contrast between the color of the text and background color being used, and like you mention I always use the alt tags to, for example to prevent spam I put the email address on my sites contact pages in an image and then put the email address in the alt tag as well such as “my name at my domain dot com” so that if anyone is using a screen reader that clearly states what the email address is. I do the same with logos too, put something like “my website dot com logo” for the same reason.
If the images are of a product or something I try to get some keywords in there, and since doing this I get a few hits from Google image search sometimes, so that can help a bit with SEO and stuff.
Anyhow thanks for publishing this, I think too many people forget about how important it is.