Here’s part one of three in follow-up to the Oxford Geek Night, to elaborate on the points I made about image alt text.
A quick recap (or introduction, if you weren’t there or haven’t seen my slides!):
An image’s alt text is presented to a user if their “user agent’ (the thing they’re using to browse web pages) does not display the image. e.g.
- A text browser is being used
- The user is blind and a screen reader reads out the web pages
Inclusion of the alt attribute on image (”<img>”) tags is required by the W3C specification.
Continue reading Image alt text
Two nights ago was the first Oxford Geek Night. This was basically a chance for web developers and designers to get together in a mixed business and social context.
I did one of the “microslots” - a five minute talk on “Avoiding accessibility pitfalls”. This is of course a huge area, and one I’d happily talk for hours about, so I focussed on three areas in which I keep seeing people trip up:
- Giving appropriate alt text
- Correct use of link text
- Using markup correctly
I’ll be elaborating on each of these areas in my next few posts; in the meantime, you can download my slides as a pdf.