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Re: ALT Text - CMS Problem

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From: Michael.Moore
Date: Apr 15, 2011 8:06AM

David Ashleydale wrote:

I have a conundrum that I'd love to hear some perspectives on. We have a
content management system at work that forces users to enter non-null ALT
text for every image on a web page -- even images that are deemed
"decorative".

First, do you think I should get them to fix this system so that users can
choose whether an image gets ALT text or null ALT text? One of the potential
problems with doing that is it might result in meaningful images getting
null ALT text because the page authors could then just "skip them" by
choosing null. Since we are now forcing page authors to think about ALT
text, they're at least trying and they cannot proceed without assigning ALT
text to every image. And we do have a much higher percentage of meaningful
images than decorative images on our site.

[Mike's Comments]

Hi David,

If you have control of the templates and CSS you could move the decorative images to the background in the templates and not allow content creators to add non-meaningful images. This would also help maintain consistent branding across the site. You may need to create a few more templates to keep everyone happy. If the CMS prevents the use of background images in the templates I would definitely look into getting that fixed.


Mike Moore