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Re: How to dynamically fix thousands of images missing alt attributes using regular expression find and replace

for

From: Jared Smith
Date: Jun 14, 2019 2:55PM

> I wonder if anyone has actually done analysis on the ratio of
> informational to decorative/formatting images on websites in general.

From the WebAIM Million Report (https://webaim.org/projects/million/):

- 18.5% of all images were linked images (meaning no other text within
the link) with missing alt or alt="" (and no other accessible name).

- An additional 15.1% of images had no alt attribute value or other
accessible name, for a total of 33.6% of images with obvious
alternative text failures.

- 13.6% of images had alt="" in cases where this *might* be valid.
It's difficult to know if these were actually decorative, but only
1.2% of images had alt="" and also a filename that would indicate it
is probably a spacer image.

- 53% of images had been given alternative text (non-empty alt
attribute). 20% of these had likely problematic alt text such as
"image", alt that duplicated adjacent text, very long alt values, etc.

Jon and John, I believe I addressed this previously - I meant to
suggest that the logic should check if the image is the ONLY thing
inside a link. But even if there were text within the link,
automatically giving such images alt="" is not always appropriate.

Thanks,

Jared