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Re: Opinions/Facts on Alt Images

for

From: _mallory
Date: Jun 1, 2016 2:17AM

I waffled on this with product lists. I ended up using alts but really
wish I hadn't now that I look back. I should have used alt="".

This is what screen reader users get today, maybe they love this but it
drives me batty:
"Foto: GEHEUGENKAART SANDISK MICRO SDHC CLASS4 32GB +ADAPTER"
GEHEUGENKAART SANDISK MICRO SDHC CLASS4 32GB +ADAPTER
(both are inside a single link to the product's page).

Certainly a list of human names sounds less irritating than product
names supplied from a central european manufacturer database, but
still... the length of that compared to "Sue Smith" pushes me even
closer to alt="" for those images.

But I'm quite interested to hear if people, esp low-vision, would still
really rather have that alt attr filled. If so, I'd sleep better :P

_mallory

On Tue, May 31, 2016 at 07:41:34PM +0000, Tim Harshbarger wrote:
> I think it would be difficult to claim the pictures are just decorative. I suspect they are present to allow someone using the directory to be able to identify the person.
>
> I was going to suggest that alt="" would be ok since the information is redundant due to the name--but I guess that doesn't make sense. If you removed all the names and replaced them with just the images, the directory would be pretty worthless.
>
> And it appears Bevi answered the question that might go something like "If someone uses the alt text to identify the picture, then they can't be using the picture to identify the people. So why include the alt text?" Apparently, as long as the alt text identifies the image, the user at least as has the option to use the picture for the intended user task--to identify the person. It really isn't for me to say how they go about doing that or what degree of disability they need to have before they would use an alt text. Thanks for the information, Bevi.
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