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Re: Alt Text on Graphic Links

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From: Jeremy Echols
Date: Apr 28, 2020 8:42AM

Playing devil's advocate for a moment, devs are as imperfect as anybody else, and this may have been a quick response that wasn't worded carefully. And to Glen's point, I often simplify things when talking to non-devs by saying there's "no alt attribute" despite setting it to a blank value.

Reading the response, I think more context is needed to say whether it's a failure, because it kind of sounds like the dev might be describing a situation where there is text in the link, and the graphic is just one piece of the link. I don't think anybody here can really say much about the situation without more context.

The critical question isn't "does the image have a good alt attribute?" The question that matters is "does the link have an accessible label?" That can be satisfied with an image that has an empty alt attribute so long as the "a" element has more in it than just the image.