Web Accessibility - Graphics, Alt Tags and More
Published: 5th November 2006
I seem to return to the topic of web accessibility
time and again, mostly driven by things I and my colleagues
are confronted with on a daily basis.
A few posts I recently discovered in a number of webmaster and design newsgroups
seem to be taking the stance that web graphics and disability access are poles
apart and never the twain shall meet.
Aside from the fact that statements such as these made by web designers and developers
denote ignorance of the very architecture which makes the web tick, they are
simply untrue.
Had the individuals posting these derogatory messages
taken a moment to carry out a little research on the subject,
they may have learned a thing or two and thought twice
before publishing wildly inaccurate statements.
Be that as it may though; I thought I would take this
opportunity to demonstrate that making a web image accessible
requires neither Voodoo nor advanced Quantum Physics.
From a web accessibility point of view, text-only browsers
and screen-readers are not able to decipher a picture’s
content and convey its meaning to the user.
Therefore, to make an image accessible and communicate
its content to blind or partially sighted internet surfers,
it needs a little something extra; the ‘Alt Tag’.
An Alt-Tag is just another attribute added to the image
source code which is expressed as alt=”Description
of Image”.
You can see a complete image source in the picture below.
By moving your cursor above the image, you will see web
accessibility in action, as your browser displays the
Alt-Tag’s content as a visual ‘tip’.
Similarly, any text-only browser or screen-reader will express the Alt-Tag’s
content verbally and thus enable the user to understand the picture’s meaning.
Search engines view web images in much the same way,
so it makes sense to use descriptive alt attributes even
if web accessibility is not top of your priority list.
Interestingly enough, this fact has led some less ethical
search engine optimisation professionals to stuff as many
meaningless keywords as humanly possible (and often impossible)
into their Alt-Tags.
Since search engines aren’t stupid however, this
practice has been noticed and is becoming less effective
than its descriptive counterpart.
Ultimately, there is far more mileage (For
web promotion and web
accessibility alike) in writing descriptive
alt tags than
merely using them as a receptacle for meaningless keywords
and phrases.
Page two of this article explains the difference between keyword stuffed tags
those which provide vital information to disabled web users and search engines
alike.
Accessible Web Design is becoming a heated topic
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