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!
![Serving Fonts from CDN]()
For maximum performance, we all know we must put our assets on CDN (another domain). Along with those assets are custom web fonts. Unfortunately custom web fonts via CDN (or any cross-domain font request) don't work in Firefox or Internet Explorer (correctly so, by spec) though...
![5 HTML5 APIs You Didn’t Know Existed]()
When you say or read "HTML5", you half expect exotic dancers and unicorns to walk into the room to the tune of "I'm Sexy and I Know It." Can you blame us though? We watched the fundamental APIs stagnate for so long that a basic feature...
![Create a Context Menu with Dojo and Dijit]()
Context menus, used in the right type of web application, can be invaluable. They provide shortcut methods to different functionality within the application and, with just a right click, they are readily available. Dojo's Dijit frameworks provides an easy way to create stylish, flexible context...
![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...
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.