Missing ALT text for images

  • Resolved pfm

    (@pfm)


    4 years, 3 months ago

    Hi Jacob,

    just a little thing I recognised using some SEO tools. There are (only) three images missing an ALT attribute:

    <img id="wppa-pre-prev" style="position:fixed;left:0;top:50%;width:100px;z-index:200011;visibility:hidden;" class="wppa-preload" title="Preload preveious image">
<img id="wppa-pre-next" style="position:fixed;right:0;top:50%;width:100px;z-index:200011;visibility:hidden;" class="wppa-preload" title="Preload next image">
<img id="wppa-pre-curr" style="position:fixed;left:0;top:0;z-index:200011;visibility:hidden;" class="wppa-preload-curr" title="Preload current image">

    Maybe you can add this to your list.

    Thank you.

    BR
    Peter

Viewing 5 replies - 1 through 5 (of 5 total)
  • Plugin Author Jacob N. Breetvelt

    (@opajaap)

    These images are there only as placeholder for loading and for diagnostic purposes. They have: visibility:hidden; so they do not need an alt.

    Butr i will add alt="dummy" to satisfy your SEO tool

    Thread Starter pfm

    (@pfm)

    Thank you and sorry!

    Hi Jacob,

    I work as a student assistant for a school and some of our faculty use this plugin on their websites. We follow the WCAG 2.0 accessibility standards on our webpages.

    The web accessibility scanning tool we use flags the alternative text “dummy” due to insufficient length of alt text on images. Since these images are not content related the best resolution is for the alt text on these images to be alt="", as screen reading software will interpret null alternative text as an image it should bypass. However, I’m unsure how null alternative text interacts with the original posters SEO tools. If possible could you update the alternative texts here to be alt="placeholder"?

    Some info on accessible images can be found at these links:
    https://www.w3.org/TR/html401/struct/objects.html#adef-alt
    https://webaim.org/techniques/alttext/

    Thank you,
    Joseph

    Plugin Author Jacob N. Breetvelt

    (@opajaap)

    To my honest opinion this is a non issue. The images are always hidden (visibility:hidden;) so no screen reader should ever see it and hence never complain about it.

    Your w3.org link says:

    Do not specify irrelevant alternate text when including images intended to format a page, for instance, alt=”red ball” would be inappropriate for an image that adds a red ball for decorating a heading or paragraph. In such cases, the alternate text should be the empty string (“”). Authors are in any case advised to avoid using images to format pages; style sheets should be used instead.
    Do not specify meaningless alternate text (e.g., “dummy text”). Not only will this frustrate users, it will slow down user agents that must convert text to speech or braille output.

    The other link tells:

    Every image must have an alt attribute. This is a requirement of HTML standard (with perhaps a few exceptions in HTML5). Images without an alt attribute are likely inaccessible. In some cases, images may be given an empty alt attribute value (e.g., alt=””, sometimes call “null” alternative text).

    So, to be compliant with the w3 standard – a reasonable requirement – i will replace it by alt="" and the conclusion should be that any validity checker that complains about it is faulty.

    One should ask himself if one should comply by the rules dictated by dumb robots rather than using his common sense…

    Thank you!

Viewing 5 replies - 1 through 5 (of 5 total)
  • The topic ‘Missing ALT text for images’ is closed to new replies.