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RE: alt tags on many images

for

From: Jukka K. Korpela
Date: Mar 4, 2004 8:17AM

On Thu, 4 Mar 2004 <EMAIL REMOVED> wrote:

> If these photos actually add content to the page, then they must have alt
> text. In fact, (I only recently learned this) alt is a *required* attribute
> of the <img> tag and it should have been used right from the outset.

By HTML specifications, alt attributes are indeed obligatory - whether the
image adds content or not. (If it doesn't, alt="" is usually suitable.)

But what the alt attribute contains is a different issue. The question
used the expression "descriptive alt tag", but the purpose of an alt
attribute is to act as a _replacement_ for an image. For a long treatise
on alt attributes, see http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/html/alt.html

The question is how to make the page work the best possible way when the
image is not seen. It is of little value to explain what's in an image
that the user does not. It's not completely pointless, since if the
description makes the image interesting, he could ask someone explain the
image in more detail - or could download the image, if the reason for not
seeing it is that the browser has been instructed not to use images for
efficiency reasons.

In a news archive, where the image is a photo that illustrates the event
described in the text, I would consider using just alt="[news photo]"
(or alt="(news photo)" or alt="news photo" - this is a matter of style).
Typically the photos _illustrate_ the text and do not contain such
additional information that could reasonably be described in words

--
Jukka "Yucca" Korpela, http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/


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