Looks like it’s time to sort out fad as well!

I think it’s also a judgment call when to use alt text vs. an empty string. For example, if there is a decorative image that doesn’t provide any real information, should you use alt text (like “a man and a woman holding hands”) or an empty string?

Superb article chap. Good work.

Alt text shouldn’t really be a ‘description’ of the image, but should provide the content alternative for the image. CONTENT and FUNCTION (if there is a function) should be provided. More details in this article.

Also, WCAG 2.0 test suite documents (these are not yet formalized, approved, or final), indicate that alt text should be no more than 100 characters. We can all take this with a grain of salt, but it’s generally a good recommendation.

Images that do not convey content should provide empty or null alt text (alt=”").

The 100 word limit: I received this information from a credible site, who directly quoted the W3C. However, after looking into this deeper, it appears the 100 word limit only appears in a draft of the WCAG 2.0. I was unable to find this information in the final release and am guessing it was dropped. MY BAD ON THAT ONE. Thank you to those who pointed this out. As Jared points out, it may be a good rule of thumb.

As per empty ALT attributes, keep in mind that these should not appear at tooltips for image. Just because IE displays them this way doesn’t mean that’s how they should be used. The idea of ALT attributes is to provide the user with something in case the image doesn’t display. If you think writing “a man and a woman holding hands” will help the user if that image doesn’t show, than put it in. For other decorative images that may not benefit from ALT text, using empty quotes allows the page to validate.

Thanks for the input everyone!

I’m not saying it’s user or search engine here where titles attributes are concerned. A well crafted title tag can cater to both.

The World Wide Web Consortium requires all images and links in a webpage to have an ALT attribute and TITLE attribute respectively.

Err, no they don’t. They require all images to have an alt attribute, title attributes are always optional.

Other than that it’s quite a good article. I find I use alt=”" quite a lot, since most of the time pictures are just eye candy - if you can’t see them, there’s no meaningful alternative. My rule of thumb is to imagine I’m reading the page out to somebody. If I’d ignore the picture in that context, I’d give the picture alt=”". That WebAIM article Jared linked to is excellent (I’m off to add a link to my blog!)

With regard to titles, I think they’re rarely useful. If you have to add a tooltip to explain what a link is about, you need to write better copy! The only time I’d regularly use a title is where the linked text is necessarily terse and non-descriptive. For example: say you have an event calendar site where each event has its own page. On each event/page you have links that say just “Next Event” and “Previous Event”. The title attribute can be used to hold the title of the next/previous event.

Of course title=”" is *required* on images with alt text, to stop IE doing something stupid like putting the alt text in a tooltip…

With your initial point,I think Ted is saying that the W3C state that “images need alts” and “links need titles” - not that images need both.

If there is a decorative image that doesn’t provide any real information, or is not important to the content of the page, my approach has been to apply this image using CSS as a background-image. Strictly speaking, if it’s a decorative image, it’s more likely to sit in the ‘presentation’ layer as opposed to the ’structure’ layer.

.wm-SLv1 {
background: url(/images/a/aa/Wmk_SLv1.gif);
background-repeat: no-repeat;
background-position: top left;
title: “effect at skill level 1″;
}

Is what I attempting not possible due to it being a part of the style sheet and not the actual page content?