WebAIM - Web Accessibility In Mind

E-mail List Archives

Re: Alternate text for images having caption adjacent

for

From: lists@srinivasu.org
Date: May 30, 2014 10:15AM


All, I read the the thread for most part but not completely. So apologise if this suggestion has already made.

How about we provide alt ="" and add an off screen message "image" along with description?

Regards,
Srinivasu Chakravarthula | PayPal | @csrinivasu
Sent from my iPhone 5C

> On 30-May-2014, at 2:52, Jared Smith < <EMAIL REMOVED> > wrote:
>
>> On Thu, May 29, 2014 at 11:57 AM, Rakesh P wrote:
>>
>> Consider If alt="" is used instead of "Image of or photo of Jared" in
>> alternate text, screen reader will not announce that an image of Jared
>> is available in the web page.
>
> Correct, this is the intention of alt="". The fact that it's a photo
> of me as opposed to text of "Jared Smith" is not really important.
>
>> If I want to ask my sited friend to
>> explain how Jared looks. Tall, fair, with blue eyes etc. alt="" will
>> not allow me to do so.
>
> You forgot dashingly handsome. And rather muscular. And charmingly
> witty. ;-) And.... well, this is precisely the problem when one starts
> to believe that the alt attribute should convey a description of what
> the image looks like - there is absolutely no end to what could be
> described. There's no way to quantify whether the text description is
> equivalent to the visual presentation. It creates a mentality that
> better equivalence must mean more verbose descriptions, when the
> result is generally just a waste of screen reader user time. It's
> important to remember that screen reader don't have a choice to listen
> to the description or not - if you put it in the alt attribute, the
> screen reader WILL read it when they encounter the image.
>
> The alt attribute if NOT for describing what an image looks like!
> Instead, it's for conveying a text alternative to the *content*
> provided by that image. What I look like is, in most cases, not useful
> or important content. If I chose not to use the image, I certainly
> wouldn't be conveying in text what I look like, right? Then why force
> such unnecessary information just onto screen reader users? If it's
> not alternative text, it shouldn't be placed in the alt attribute.
>
> Jared
> > >