WebAIM - Web Accessibility In Mind

E-mail List Archives

Re: Alt text for images

for

From: Jeremy Echols
Date: Sep 21, 2020 4:51PM


It's worth noting that many CMSes let you reuse the same image in different contexts, but they also reuse the alt attribute. We run Drupal for pretty a huge number of our pages, and this is a constant problem. A general-purpose "stock"-like photo of a student can be used for so many purposes, and when the CMS tries to force a single alt text on you, it becomes a huge pain.

Hopefully large companies with hundreds of thousands of images have the staffing to describe those images in context, every time they're used. If not, it may be best to make sure the copy describes whatever the image is there for, and just give the images a null alt attribute (alt="").