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

[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.