Comments on: What to do about alt text

By: zsepi

zsepi — Thu, 01 Jan 1970 01:00:00 +0000

I would put the caption text in the alt attribute (where it belongs), then use CSS and/or JavaScript to display it after the image as a “normal” caption

By: mrben

mrben — Thu, 01 Jan 1970 01:00:00 +0000

Dammit – I was about to suggest that

By: sil

sil — Thu, 01 Jan 1970 01:00:00 +0000

How would you use CSS to display it after the image? JavaScript is, er, doable, certainly, but it’s rather a sledgehammer to crack a smallish nut.

By: Richard Rutter

Richard Rutter — Thu, 01 Jan 1970 01:00:00 +0000

It’s a tricky question that’s bugged me too. I’m not sure there’s an entirely satisfactory answer, but one approach is to think about the caption and the alt text in tandem.

By which I mean that the caption does not necessarily belong in the alt text. BBC News approaches this quite well: consider this story. The caption for the photo is “Manchester United fans have made their feelings clear” but the alt text is simply “Angry fans“. They could expand on the angry fans bit to describe the photo a little more, but with the two pieces of text working in tandem, the overall ‘picture’ is clear.

By: sil

sil — Thu, 01 Jan 1970 01:00:00 +0000

Richard: I’ve thought about that. The key point from my perspective is that the alt text, as I understand it, isn’t supposed to describe the picture, it’s supposed to be text that replaces the picture. So if you replace the picture with its alt text, the page still makes sense, and you don’t even need to know that there was a picture there. That’s all well and good as long as the picture is simply supporting the bulk of the text, but when the picture itself is a critical part of the content then it’s left a bit adrift. I reckon this is a legacy of HTML’s original design as a language for marking up academic documents, where the only images you’d have got would have been graphs :-)

By: deepak

deepak — Thu, 01 Jan 1970 01:00:00 +0000

Something more to think about: IE renders alt text as tooltip while Firfox renders only ‘title’ text as tooltip.

By: Richard Rutter

Richard Rutter — Thu, 01 Jan 1970 01:00:00 +0000

You’re indeed right that the alt text is an alternative to the image, hence the attribute’s name of course. That said I think the practicality of how alt text is used is slightly different.

The reality is that images are always announced in one way or another so folks want to know what they are missing out on. I’ve been told this is particularly important to the visually impaired. That’s not say a lengthy description is necessarily required as the alt text still needs to fit into the flow of the document. Tricky stuff though.

By: Simon Willison

Simon Willison — Thu, 01 Jan 1970 01:00:00 +0000

zsepi: I disagree; the caption does NOT belong in the attribute. The alt attribute is meant to act as an alternative to the image – that’s why browsers aren’t meant to display it at all if images are turned on (something IE and Netscape 4 famously get wrong).

Not that I have any good answers for Stuart though. To be honest, I’m stumped.

By: zsepi

zsepi — Thu, 01 Jan 1970 01:00:00 +0000

sil,
the alt attribute should be empty only when its image’s point is decoration. Since we do separate content and presentation, there should be no decoration images in the markup (spare for the ones added with css or javascript), hence the alt should always contain the alternative content.

To achieve your goal with CSS, all you should write is img[alt]:after { content: attr(alt); }. However, it works not in most browsers (only managed to get it right in Opera). Ouch.
Guess you have to use the sledgehammer – the problem now does resemble a nail, doesn’t it?

By: Richard Rutter

Richard Rutter — Thu, 01 Jan 1970 01:00:00 +0000

As a point of reference, Joe Clark writes in his book “If the alt text of an image would duplicate words that immediately precede or follow the image you may use an empty alt text. A typical example of this is an About Us page that show little thumbnail photos of staff next to their names.”

Perhaps that was the answer all along, as you originally hinted.