As part of my day job, questions about web accessibility occasionally cross my desk and I am continually amazed at just what a shit show web accessibility standards still are.
For example, the Web Content Accessibility Group standards require that there be alternative text for content non-text content. For images on a web page, this is accomplished by adding a description of the image in the ALT attribute in the IMG tag. So ALT=”Cats playing”. So far, so good.
Some images, however, are purely decorative, and reading off descriptions of purely decorative images would essentially clutter the page for visually impaired users relying on screen readers. So the standard is to provide a cue to the screen reader to ignore the decorative image altogether.
Can you guess how that is accomplished? The ALT attribute is supposed to be left blank, like this.
ALT=""
The obvious problem with this is that the visually impaired user has no way to tell if a given image’s ALT tag was left empty because the image is purely decorative or if it was left empty because the designer was lazy and simply didn’t bother to put in a description.
And let’s be very frank: the number of ALT tags that are empty because people are too busy or don’t know they’re supposed to give a description vastly outnumbers the ones that are left blank intentionally because of the decorative image standard.
This is like my doctor who runs a test and tells me that he’ll call me only if there’s a negative result that requires a follow-up. If I never hear from my doctor, I can’t be sure whether this is because my test was fine or because I missed his call or he forgot or some other issue.
The solution in both cases is that the positive test result or decorative image should be proactively indicated as such. I’m sure there was a good reason ALT=”decorative” simply Would Not Work(TM), but the current solution is ridiculous and confusing to even technically advanced end users.