Web Accessibility and Alt Attributes in Image Tags
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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 a stunning ignorance of the very architecture which actually makes the Internet tick, they are
simply untrue, as anyone who's ever used a screen reader will readily testify to, |
Anyone claiming that Images and Web Accessibility are poles apart, is...
full of it, to put it politely.
Had the individuals posting these derogatory messages
taken even a moment to carry out a little research on the subject,
they may have learned a thing or two and thought twice
before publishing such complete and utter... shall we say... 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 visually impaired person's point of view, their text-only browsers
or screen-readers is not able to actually ascertain 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 Attribute’.
An Alt-Attribute is just another element added to the image
source code, which is expressed as alt=”Description
of Image”, and is there for web accessibility reasons, and not in fact so unethical SEOs can stuff it as full of irrelevant keywords as humanly possible, but more of that in a minute.
You can see the image's complete source in the... errrm... image below.
By moving your cursor above the image, you will see web
accessibility in action, as your browser displays the
Alt-Attribute’s content as a visual ‘tip’. Similarly, any text-only browser or screen-reader will express the Alt-Attribute’s
content verbally and thus enable the user to understand the picture’s meaning.
Search engines view and index web images in much the same way,
so it makes sense for web designers to use descriptive alt attributes even
if web accessibility is not top of their priority list.
Interestingly enough, this fact has led some unethical
search engine optimisation professionals to stuff as many
meaningless keywords as humanly possible (and often impossible)
into their Alt-Attributes, in an effort to fool Google into allocating them higher rankings.
Since Google isn't stupid, however, this
keyword-stuffing practice has been noticed and is becoming less effective
than its properly descriptive counterpart.
Ultimately, there is far more mileage (For and web
accessibility alike) in writing than
merely using them as a receptacle for meaningless keywords
and phrases. |
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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.
Read more...
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