Accessibility and alt Attributes

By  on  

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!

Recent Features

  • By
    Introducing MooTools Templated

    One major problem with creating UI components with the MooTools JavaScript framework is that there isn't a great way of allowing customization of template and ease of node creation. As of today, there are two ways of creating: new Element Madness The first way to create UI-driven...

  • By
    Responsive Images: The Ultimate Guide

    Chances are that any Web designers using our Ghostlab browser testing app, which allows seamless testing across all devices simultaneously, will have worked with responsive design in some shape or form. And as today's websites and devices become ever more varied, a plethora of responsive images...

Incredible Demos

  • By
    iPhone-Style Passwords Using MooTools PassShark

    Every once in a while I come across a plugin that blows me out of the water and the most recent culprit is PassShark: a MooTools plugin that duplicates the iPhone's method of showing/hiding the last character in a password field. This gem of...

  • By
    iPhone Click Effect Using MooTools or jQuery

    One thing I love about love about Safari on the iPhone is that Safari provides a darkened background effect when you click a link. It's the most subtle of details but just enforces than an action is taking place. So why not implement that...

Discussion

  1. Really good! I added a sniping code to my editor to remember the alt attribute. Other attributes very important are the following:

    meta charset='uft-8' (html5) or http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8" (html4)

    I’m from Brazil and these tags are really important for softwares that reads screens.

  2. 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.

Wrap your code in <pre class="{language}"></pre> tags, link to a GitHub gist, JSFiddle fiddle, or CodePen pen to embed!