Image Alt Attributes

by Joe Gillespie — Jul 1, 2001

Accessibility is becoming a big issue with new legislation making it manditory rather than optional. Most of it is just plain common sense.

HTML provides for 'Alt' attributes for image tags so that people who have images switched off, or are using a 'screen reader' program, can make some sense of the images on a Web page.

Most WYSIWYG editors will allow you to omit alt tags, but you shouldn't, even if the graphic is a meaningless spacer GIF (you don't use those now, do you?) it should say so - Alt="".

All pictures, diced pictures and graphic text should have an 'alt'. Leaving them out is, at best, lazy and at worst, illegal!

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