Alt text on icons pages

[sophie]

I was looking at the icons page for some friends recently when I realised something; each icon on the page has the description as its ALT text, even though the description is given in the next column over anyway.

(for an example of an icons page with descriptions, see my icons page.)

Since I myself don't use a screen reader, I don't know whether this makes things easier or more difficult for those who do, or whether it impacts accessibility in any other way. One of the aforementioned friends, who is blind and uses NVDA (a free, open-source screen reader for Windows), said that they think it's a little odd and that it would probably be better to use the keywords as the ALT text on that page. (Everywhere else, of course, should still use the description.)

I'd love to get input from a wider audience, though, and particularly from people for whom this sort of thing matters, such as those using screen readers. What do you all think? I'd post to dw_suggestions but I'd prefer to know the views from the people here first.

Comments

[softestbullet]

How would it be better to have the alt text be keywords? Wouldn't that also be read twice?

I've always thought the descriptions shouldn't be displayed at all outside of alt text. But I was just thinking of my own comfort (I get really anxious about the quality of my descriptions, so the fewer people reading them, the better, lol).

[jeshyr]

I'm reasonably sure this was discussed at some point and eventually it was decided that consistency was most important - i.e.: every time a user pic is displayed on the site we use the description for the alt tag.

I'd certainly love to get feedback from more screen reader users about their preferences though - that's always the best way to figure these things out of course!!

[deborah]

I'm reasonably sure this was discussed at some point and eventually it was decided that consistency was most important

Yes, I think originally we were going to use blank alt text for the icons and it was screenreader users in this comm who requested the current behaviour. But if consensus changes, it's easy enough to change the behaviour. I would only change the alt to blank strings, in that case, though, since the caption already provides the image description.

[alianora]

my keywords usually make no sense to anyone but me (I use song lyrics, nicknames, private jokes, etc), whereas my alt text actually describes the icon, so i dont think it would be very helpful.

[deborah]

There's a constant battle over keywords-as-meaningful; despite the open ticket to replace keywords in mouseover title with description there's no consensus on best usability. I'm with you as far as finding keywords irrelevant and somewhat inaccessible but it seems like this issue splits the community pretty solidly down the middle.

[treeowl]

I'm not sure how to make this work for DW, but I think a proper alt text for an icon is very often different from a good description of it for sighted people. For example, a photo might have an alt text of "Intensely focused green-haired girl holding a tennis racket, preparing to serve" and a description of "Barbara Jones at the Timbuktu teen tennis championships".