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Re: Regarding images lacking alts

for

From: Jukka K. Korpela
Date: Dec 4, 2012 3:25PM

2012-12-05 0:00, Jared Smith wrote:

> I do, however, like the idea of the alert script to identify images
> that do not have an alt attribute defined,

There are various existing tools for informing the user about alt
attribute issues. I suppose they are mainly useful for developers (and
e.g. to people who evaluate pages),

In Firefox, the Web Developer Extension has an "Images" menu, where you
can select e.g. "Display alt attributes" and (under "Outline images")
options for outlining images without alt attributes and/or images with
empty alt attributes. The outline is just a thin red line, though.

But using the Stylish add-on in Firefox, you can easily specify a user
style sheet for highlighting images without alt attributes, using e.g.
the CSS code
img:not([alt]) { outline: dashed red 3px; }

> though I suppose this could
> simply result in alt="" (or worse) being added instead of true,
> equivalent alternative text.

That's quite possible. On a quick look at various sites, with alt
attribute display enabled, I noticed that wrong alt attributes are a
more common problem than lack of alt attributes. Problems vary from
pointless short stories written into the attributes to serious issues
like alt="" on an image that is the sole content of a link.

Yucca