Comments on: Is alt text necessary for photo sharing sites?

By: Mark

Mark — Mon, 22 Mar 2010 13:27:02 +0000

I found your article very interesting.

I thought readers would be interested in an application called Alt&Title that applies missing alt and title attributes to applicable HTML tags. I have used it on hundreds of web pages and it has saved me many hours of work.

Give it a go. I hope you find it as useful as I have!

Here is the web page promoting it…

http://www.flysoftware.com/products/altandtitle/overview.asp

By: Bruce

Bruce — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 10:20:27 +0000

Thanks for your feedback Bull. Given you have absolutely nothing to add to the debate, or even constructive critique as to why the post is bullshit, I’m assuming you’re a comment spammer and have deleted the URL you left.

By: Bull

Bull — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 01:05:55 +0000

I Think That You Have Wrote A Load Of B**LS**T… Its Stupid Posts Like This That Google Finds When It Should Really Be USEFUL Information…

By: Bruce

Bruce — Sat, 28 Jun 2008 17:11:28 +0000

I would recommend the destination, yes – as a screenreader will prefix it with “link”, so the obvious question to answer is “link to where?”

By: Steven Clark

Steven Clark — Sat, 28 Jun 2008 03:07:35 +0000

My first statement is that I think HTML 5 shouldn’t be worrying about use cases regarding the business model of Flickr. Tails wagging horses. Its up to Flickr to work out ways to build better products and not necessarily for HTML 5 to adapt to them. Otherwise we might as well re-birth FP and lower the bar again on the basis any idiot might want to make a web page so HTML Junk is perfectly valid… Just a perspective among many lol. I agree that alt should be mandatory and if the image has no meaning / function then empty alt works fine as is. By making it optional then CMS etc will default to omit it, I’d expect.

My second comment is a question. What if an image could have relevant content meaning BUT still be a link. How would that work? Say, if the image was a photo on a museum website of a specific work of art. Then someone made that image click to an external site that had some related content. Admittedly contrived, but on the one hand you would have an image “Ming Vase yada yada” and an external website named “The Society of Chinese Artefact Historians”. Perhaps the description of the Ming vase itself is still relevant content in that case? I guess I’m wondering if an image can sometimes have two functions, not one? And, if so, would you still recommend the destination?

By: Johan De Silva

Johan De Silva — Sat, 21 Jun 2008 15:13:34 +0000

I do NOT agree regarding Alt text for homepage links. The alt attribute text of “home” would also benefit tool tipping visual users (by using the link attribute) and alt attribute should describe the content for when images are off or for blined users. Well thats what I always thought.