Can the alt attribute be omitted without hurting accessibility?
In the current
editor's draft of HTML 5, it is suggested that the alt attribute for
img elements should no longer be required. The
reasoning is that in some cases alt text will be
omitted, regardless of whether it is required or not, so it
might as well be made optional. Otherwise some authoring
tools will automatically insert empty, repeated or
meaningless alt text. At least that's how I understand the
reasoning explained in
Why the Alt Attribute May Be Omitted.
Basically it seems to come down to "Many people and many
tools aren't using the alt attribute properly,
and adding alt text to images uploaded to online photo
galleries like Flickr is too much work for end users and
tool developers, so the alt attribute should be
made optional." Is that really the best solution
though?
To help authors write useful alt text, the HTML 5
specification should provide guidance on that. I am pleased
to see that the section describing
the img element
in the current draft does that well, except for the first
example which seems a bit too long (and contains information
that all users would benefit from). The rest of the examples
are good. They could be worked on, but they are good.
Despite that guidance, there will always be cases where alt
text is missing, either because of broken authoring tools or
because of author ignorance or laziness. So the
specification needs to define how user agents should handle
missing alt attributes. In no way does that
necessarily mean that images with missing
alt attributes should be valid HTML 5.