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

[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.