Alt Text on Staff Page User Icons

[chemicallace]

I'm working on Bug 2050 and wanted to get the opinions of screen-reader users and others who look at the alt text on images for user icons.

Currently, the alt text for icons is generally the description the user provides for the icon and on regular site pages this is automatically added when the page is generated. On the Dreamwidth staff page, there is no alt text for any of the icons at this time. I try to include alt text in my images on most web pages for both standards compliance and accessibility reasons. However, it's not clear in this situation whether or not having an alt text on these icons with the user name of the icon owner, key words, or a description would be useful or a nuisance. The user name is given in text in close proximity to the image, and any keywords or descriptions would be undesirable on our end because they would need to be hard-coded into the page and wouldn't automatically update when the user updated their icon keywords or description.

Would alt text on these user icons be helpful? Or is it unnecessary and/or an annoyance?

Comments

[vass]

Shouldn't it be the icon description, rather than the keywords? I filled in the description field specifically because I thought that was the alt text.

[chemicallace]

It's not the alt text, though it is displayed on the user icons page.

[pne]

Are you confusing the official meaning of "alt text" with the common (but, arguably, inaccurate) use of "alt text"?

It seems to me that you use it to mean "the text that will display, in many graphical browsers, in a tooltip, when the mouse hovers over something", while vass uses it to mean "the text that will display instead of the image, for example, if the browser does not support images, if images are turned off, or if the image could not be loaded".

Your meaning would correspond to the "title" attribute in the source code, while their meaning would correspond to the "alt" attribute in the source code.

[chemicallace]

Yes, you're right. This is why I shouldn't double check something when responding to comments after waking up in the middle of the night. I tiredly looked at it, was surprised it wasn't the description because I could have sworn it was when I checked earlier, and didn't err on the side of caution and wait until being actually awake to respond. I've also edited the entry to clarify.

[denise]

One thing that might be confusing here is that chemicallace isn't talking about the alt text of icons in general, but about the images on the staff page. Those images are icon-shaped and icon-sized and hosted as userpics (uploaded to the dw_staff community) but only for ease of hosting so we didn't need to check people's pictures into the repositories -- the pictures on that page aren't generated by the same code that generates user icons, etc. Don't think of them on

My opinion is that the bio pictures add no real content to the page -- they're just there to break up the unrelenting blocks of text, really, although it is nice to have human faces on the people working on the project -- and it would be annoying for screenreader users to listen to a description of each person's bio pic when it adds nothing to the content of the page. But I don't use a 'reader, and people might want to know that there's a picture of so-and-so next to each of their bios!

[lightgetsin]

I tend to agree -- if there's a legitimate reason not to want alt text here anyway, I don't think it's a big deal because it's not content I care about. Though as a general rule, I tend to think 'it's not important' isn't itself a sufficient reason to leave out alt text.

[denise]

Yeah, I'm not a fan of that argument either, which is why the whole soliciting of opinions thing, etc. It's just a really weird case here, since I do really consider the images to be more-or-less decorative, and there are kind of a lot of them; I think it would get awfully repetitive to listen to.

[chemicallace]

Yes, thank you for clarifying what I failed to convey about how these are fake user icons. Not all of them are uploaded to dw_staff, though. Perhaps they shouldn't be, because if you hover over the ones that are it gives the little pop-up box you would expect to see for the comm, not the user.

[jeshyr]

In every other DW context, the description field is used as the alt text. I'm not sure why the staff page would be any different, but I'd think for consistency it should be the same there too.

r

[denise]

That information actually isn't available to that page, since they're not treated as userpics -- they're just uploaded as userpics for ease of hosting. The system doesn't know they're userpics, it just pulls the images from the URL.

[kyrielle]

I don't know about that, but I went to look, and the hover-over tooltip for the staff journal threw me for a loop. Hover-overs are supposed to take me to the person being talked about/referenced.... I get that it's because that icon space is being used, but...meh.

[kareila]

Yeah, I agree that if they're not "real" userpics the hover menu shouldn't be displaying. But that's a separate issue from the alt text.