How many opportunities do we have to dramatically improve people’s lives just by doing our job a little better? –Steve Krug, Don’t Make Me Think
I love this quote! There are a lot of things I can’t control, but this makes me feel good simply about adding some alt text to a web page. In fact, when Krug addresses fears that accessibility will mean more work, he mentions missing alt text as an example of something that is easy to fix.
Which is why it was so disheartening to hear recently that our metasearch vendor, which is supposed to release an upgrade soon that will significantly address accessibility problems, is planning to use the same generic alt text for all its resource icons rather than alt text specific to each icon. How this is supposed to help someone using a text browser or screen reader is beyond me, especially given that customers can create and add any icons they want. If the plan goes forward (and it may change), patrons will be clued into the fact that there is some sort of graphic associated with the record but–sorry!–they won’t be able to figure out exactly what it is.
Using alt text is the baby talk of accessibility. If you can’t get the other stuff right, or you’re still learning about it, or your organization doesn’t support something you’d like to do, at least get your alt text right, for goodness’ sake.