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Is "this-or-that logo" adequate in an ALT text?

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From: Jukka Korpela
Date: Aug 19, 2002 12:05AM

The way I've understood the purpose of ALT attributes, such an attribute
should provide a text that can be used in place of the image, carrying out
the same function as the image has when displayed and seen. In the optimal
case, the ALT attribute should in no way say a word _about_ the image.
Treating an ALT attribute as "description of the image" tends to lead to
confusion and absurdity, as demonstrated e.g. by the howlers at
http://ppewww.ph.gla.ac.uk/~flavell/alt/alt-text.html

But to my disappointment, even the W3C material (including HTML
specifications and WAI recommendations) is rather vague and potentially
misleading here. And having read the official Section 508 rules guide,
http://www.access-board.gov/sec508/guide/1194.22.htm
I'm even more disappointed. The Section 508 rules are in many ways more
practically oriented and easier to grasp than WCAG, but the _first_ rule
almost drives me into madness. It begins with '(a) A text equivalent for
every non-text element shall be provided (e.g., via "alt", "longdesc", or in
element content)', which is fine (except that "longdesc" shouldn't really be
marketed as an _alternative_ to "alt" even implicitly), but the first
example is
<img src="art/logo-green.gif" alt="Access Board Logo">
And later they even _repeat_ this example in another context, and give this
even stranger example:
<img src="image/ab_logo1.gif" alt="The Architectural and Transportation
Barriers Compliance Board emblem-Go to Access Board website"
which is said to appear at http://www.section508.gov/ where it doesn't
appear, as far as I can tell. But that example is repeated in different
documents around the Web.

What about W3C WAI, http://www.w3.org/WAI/ ? On Lynx, we get a page that
starts with

W3C logo Web Accessibility Initiative logo skip navigation bar WAI

In an E-mail discussion about "this-or-that logo" in ALT texts, a person
with very good understanding of accessibility told me that logos are an
exception. He wrote (to formulate what I understood, the way I'd say it if I
agreed) that the "logo" concept is universal and not just visual, and
everyone knows that "this-or-that logo" means 'this page has a this-or-that
stamp on it', i.e. belongs to the official this-or-that site.

As a practical note, such information is hardly needed if the page itself
says, e.g. in a heading or its first paragraph, that it is an official
this-or-that page, in some wording.

But as a compact indication of belonging to a site, logos might be useful.
The question arises what to use as ALT texts when other content of the page
does not make the situation clear enough so that we can use alt="". If
images were not used at all (imagine e.g. that you are constructing a site
for FooBar, without having a FooBar logo designed yet), would you write text
like "FooBar logo" to indicate that the page belongs to the FooBar site? I'd
bet you would write something like "This page is part of the official FooBar
site." So why not use that as the textual alternative for a logo image? It
says in words what the logo says in graphic. But embedding that information
into other texts and using alt="" for logo images is even better, if you ask
me.

--
Jukka Korpela, senior adviser
TIEKE Finnish Information Society Development Centre
http://www.tieke.fi
Phone: +358 9 4763 0397 Fax: +358 9 4763 0399


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