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Re: Regarding images lacking alts

for

From: Jared Smith
Date: Dec 4, 2012 3:00PM

On Tue, Dec 4, 2012 at 2:26 PM, Bryan Garaventa wrote:

> Here is a jQuery script that fixes it dynamically

I'm with Jukka - I don't see what this 'fixes'. Most assistive
technologies already fall back to title attribute values if
alternative text is not present - and most accessibility frameworks
and even HTML5 are moving toward defining title attributes to function
this way. This hack simply presents an appearance of accessibility
where there is none defined. Declared alternative text is very
different than pulling a somewhat arbitrary value from elsewhere and
presenting it as alternative text.

This approach could limit a technology's ability to do something
(perhaps analyze the image contents, perform an image search, present
the image filename or URL, etc.) with an image that is truly missing
alternative text, as opposed to being assigned alt="". In VoiceOver,
this would cause both the title attribute text and the (now generated)
alternative text to be read twice.

I do, however, like the idea of the alert script to identify images
that do not have an alt attribute defined, though I suppose this could
simply result in alt="" (or worse) being added instead of true,
equivalent alternative text.

There are no shortcuts to proper alternative text.

Jared