Posted by Charles Sweeney on 08/18/05 01:09

Dylan Parry wrote

> Using a pointed stick and pebbles, Red E. Kilowatt scraped:
>
>> The purpose of alt text is to identify graphics that people either
>> can't see or aren't downloading, so why wouldn't you use the alt text
>> to identify the image as the site logo?
>
> No, the purpose of alt text is to act as a _text replacement_ for when
> an image is not or cannot be displayed (a subtle difference from your
> definition).
>
> One should not give alt text such as "Company Name Logo" but something
> more appropriate, such as "Company Name". Whether it is the logo is
> neither here nor there, and including the word "logo" in the alt text
> reduces it to a description not a replacement, which is *not* the
> purpose of alt text.

I disagree. The alt text should describe the picture. If the image is
a logo, I want to know it's a logo.

When I first went online, due to a very slow modem I always surfed with
images switched off (same even today using a mobile phone as a modem).
A good description of the image made sense to me, and helped me
understand what the page was about.

Tell me this, if the picture is of a man getting presented with a
cheque, what alt text would you use? I would use something like
"Picture of Mr A receiving a cheque from Mr B". What's wrong with that?

> Also, setting alt text to "" is not just to get the page to validate
> but rather to say to the user-agent that if the image cannot or is not
> displayed then the suitable alt text is "", ie. the image has no
> meaning
> other than as eye-candy and can be safely ignored by the user.

I wouldn't use the alt attribute in such a case. If you must use it,
then "meaningless image" would be better.

> If no
> alt text was given, however, the user-agent may choose to display the
> word "image" or even "image.ext", which is less than helpful and may
> lead the user to think that the image was actual content, or worse
> still it would litter the page with the word "image" making it
> difficult to read.

In which case they should get a better user agent. If the picture
cannot be displayed, and there is no alt text, the agent should ignore
it.

--
Charles Sweeney
http://CharlesSweeney.com

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