Did you know that Alt Text are inaccessible? Don't get me wrong though, alt text is an extremely essential element of your digital content, but only when applied in the correct circumstances.
When to use Alt Text.
Alt text are descriptions about images that you have included in your digital content. In order to ensure that all the users accessing your content, including screen-reader users, are able to comprehend information relayed through images, you have an obligation to include accurate image descriptions. Use of Alt text is required when your image is passing important information(Meaningful images) and in the case that a user cannot see it, would be greatly inconvenienced.
Examples of proper situations to include alt text are in logos, graphs presented as pictures, Company Icons etc.
When to not use Alt Text.
As said earlier, the use of alt text is not always a blessing and at times can be a source of inaccessibility. When we add non-important or decorative images on our pages, it is not necessary to use alt text. Especially when the content has a lot of decorative or unnecessary images, It can be a great source of nuisance to users of screen-readers and may lead to the user being lead astray from the main message of the content.
Choosing Where and where to not use Alt Text
One can have quite a debate about the meaningfulness of an image to a page since it is pretty much subjective and the opinion will most likely from one person to the next. Bearing this in mind, one is advised to think about the purpose of the image and to think if the purpose of the page will be conveyed without the image.
Adding Alt text to your image
When the image is meaningful : use <alt="add your description in between the quotation marks">
When the image is decorative; use <alt=""> with nothing between the quotation marks.
One thing to note is that you should never fail to include an alt attribute, this is because, the screen reader will simply notify the user of the presence of an image and jump over it, leaving the user guessing what the image is about.
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