Adding ALT

Could be a bug, I certainly won’t deny it.

But that part of the plug-in is actually fairly simple, so I’m not sure what the bug might be, exactly.

I can definitely say that the *only* route to correction if you’ve gotten the error code in the post content is to delete the image and insert it again. (If I was a sophisticated JS programmer, I might have had other options. But I’m not.)

However, if the image already has an alt attribute, it should definitely not be showing up with the error notation, unless the alt attribute value was identical to the image file name. Was that the case?

Also, just so you know – in the visual editor, if you click on an image that’s been added and get to the edit modal for the image, that’s *not* the same editing modal as for adding an image. When you add an image, it’s showing the information from the media library, but if you click on the image in the post to edit, then it shows the image actually in the post, regardless of what’s been saved in the media library.

WP Accessibility filters out the alt attribute if it’s the same as the title (that’s the media attachment title, *not* the title attribute field), which is a field extracted from the file name. If that title has been changed to provide a different automatic alt, that could be a problem.

Thank you, Joe.

Ah, I think that’s what it was. The particular image I used FILENAME:wordpress_bleu.jpg had been entered into the media library with the ALT and TITLE the same “WordPress logo”.

And thank you for the explanation of the difference between the “visual editor” and the description in the media library. Not sure why they are different, but at least I know know they are.

I personally have been advocating that since 99% of images are, what I like to call “pretty pictures” and are not essential to understanding the content, that we should code nearly all images with the null alt. So I am thrilled to have an easy way to mark images as decorative using you revised plugin. Thanks again.

Glad to help!

I have a similar issue. With WP Accessibility enabled, when I insert media (which has an alt tag in the library) the image is inserted with a blank alt tag and a warning.

However, if I disable WP Accessibility, the inserted image has an alt tag again?

WP 4.2.2 with a reasonable amount of other plugins, I don’t know if there’s some kind of conflict. We only noticed this recently.

If this is an alt attribute that’s the same as the name of the file, that would cause a warning. Is that the case?

It’s not the same as the filename. Both the title and alt text field are populated in the library with, “Test Example”

With WP Accessibility disabled this is inserted:

<img class=”alignnone size-full wp-image-6078″ src=”xxx/logos3.jpg” alt=”Test Example” width=”185″ height=”122″ />

With WP Accessibility enabled this is inserted (with the div and warning around it):

<img class=”alignnone size-full wp-image-6078″ src=”xxx/logos3.jpg” alt=”” width=”185″ height=”122″ />

OK. It’s being stripped out because it matches the title. In most situations, the title should not match the alt attribute.

Why not? The title is not inserted in the content.

The default behavior is for the image title to be inserted as the alt attribute if there’s no alt attribute assigned. The default title is the file name. So the default combination is most likely an invalid title attribute if the title is the same as the alt. it’s entirely possible to have them be legitimately the same, but since the most common invalid case also has that characteristic, I’ve chosen to block that behavior.

Which then makes no sense at all if you’re using descriptively named image files as when you upload them to the library the title is automatically exactly what you’d want/expect it to be.

But that’s an unusual case, and I have absolutely no way of detecting whether the titles are appropriate; it’s not a possibility. In fact, the alt attribute can be wholly inappropriate, and would be accepted by WP Accessibility. It’s definitely not a perfect system.

I think I could detect whether or not the alt attribute has an actual value in it (as opposed to just inheriting the title), but that’s the best I could do.

Well I don’t know if people are using plugins that automatically populate the alt text with the title but in my case alt text is blank by default for uploaded media. In my opinion if I have populated the alt text field that is what should be used, regardless of anything else.

Oh and if the plugin is refusing to use the alt text rather than it actually being blank, it would be better if the inserted error message changed accordingly.

It’s WordPress core that automatically inserts the title value as an alt attribute, so that’s true for everybody using WordPress. It doesn’t actually add it to the alt text field, just inserts it into the img tag in the HTML.

And the most recent version of WP Accessibility does use a different message depending on curcumstance.