Alternative Text for Images: How Bad Are Our Alt-Text Anyway?

Alt text really are one of the low-hanging fruit of an inclusive web. Images need to be described. It is the very first success criteria in WCAG - SC 1.1.1: Non-text Content (Level A). It is so simple, yet it isn't. Despite all the guidance, including presentations like this one, folks get it wrong, over and over again. A lot can be done through using approaches like those recommended in the Authoring Tool Accessibility Guidelines (ATAG) 2.0. Clearly, authors need support.

This presentation will cover a bit of this theory, but also highlight a simple Python script that I wrote to crawl a website so that we can more easily examine the alternative text that is provided. I'll quickly walk through the script, and then look at some of the more entertaining alt-text which is sitting on public government websites.

It is worth noting that there is no automated tool that presently does much more than check that there is alt-text on an image. This clearly isn't sufficient to determining if the meaning of the image is represented in that alt text.