Web Development
Web Developer Guidelines
Visual Design Recommendations

Checkpoint 1.5 - RSS

Explanatory text is available for each image

WCAG 1.0 Priority 1

WCAG Guideline 1. Provide equivalent alternatives to auditory and visual content.

Images on a web page are visual components and, along with other non-text elements such as frames, image maps, scripts, applets or programmatic objects, cannot be read by screen readers. Image viewing is also sometime disabled by the user for bandwidth reasons, yet the inherent information of the image still needs to be conveyed.

Providing information without an alternative text description will mean that people with vision impairments will not be able to access all the content.

Requirement

Provide alt attributes for every image.

Recommendation

Even if image content is not important, it needs to have an alternative so that people are aware that information is not being missed.

Checking Tool

  • Internet Explorer - AIS Toolbar: Images > Toggle Image/Alt
  • Firefox - Web Developer's Toolbar: Images > Outline Images > Images Without Alt Attributes

Information Source

The original source of this information is located on the W3C web site  (www.w3.org/TR/WCAG10-TECHS/#tech-text-equivalent)

 

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