These authors are forgetting the purpose of the alt attribute: to convey some information about the image (other than “PIC01837463.JPG”) to users who can not perceive the visusal content of the image, such as the googlebot, and users with vision disabilities.

In the case of these dance images, the googlebot just needs some content it can show in search results “photo of a dance performance”. This same alt text works just as well for a person who is blind.

The blind user is a mature, thinking human being, who probablly is very well aware that he or she will never get the same content from an image that a sighted user would. However, the alt text is there so this user can put the images into the context of the rest of the site: She now knows there are 14 images of dancing, rather than a whole bunch of JAWS-babble “img: PIC0034738.JPG”.

Even short alt text provides context, and improves the sound of the site to users of screen readers. It’s completely unnecessary to try to convey the exact same content. It is necessary to make a bit of effort to convey that there are in fact images (don’t use alt=”” where inapropriate), and what their subject matter is.

I think there are still some very interesting questions around the provision of alternatives (not just alternatives for visual) when there is emotional or artistic purpose. My guess if you asked an artist to define what is art is that they would say its completely dependant on context. Art that makes sense in one context (say 19th century France) would not have the same effect in a different one (say modern Britain). That notion does not stop at cultures but extends to individuals too. Perception and understanding are not static and passive they are active. We participate in them and we are all very different. Also a painting or a poem or a piece of music is much more than its content and maybe much more than its purpose. A description of an emotion is not the same as the emotion. This is what makes art, poetry, education (and in fact even life) such fun – its guesswork. We simply don’t know how something will be perceived by anyone at all, so we guess, and in that approximate guesswork is the possibilty that we are completely wrong or very innacurate. But we try and that’s the point.

We must do our best to provide materials in ways that best communicate to whoever the audience may be. A different experience is still worthwhile.

I am minded of the work my cycling group is doing to support cycling for blind people by providing tandem riding. Of course this is a totally different experience to solo cycling and even to sighted tandem riding but its still a wonderful experience.

Art is I think a communication. Each of us will have a different emotional response. That doesn’t matter and doesn’t invalidate the experience. The communication is between the author (who had the purpose) and the recipient (who has the perception mechanisms whatever they are). It *isn’t* about dead material.

What I’m saying is that purpose is all, because its an indispensable part of communication and since its communication we are trying to do we should try to do that and that requires providing our best efforts to meet perception requirements that we may not be used to providing because they are different to what we are used to.

I don’t believe in art for the elite, which is what it would be if we didn’t try to communicate with everyone that was in the audience.

andy

3.  Where does alt text fit into all this?
Answer: ‘alt’ is simply a technical tool, one tag in one language, it isn’t the door to paradise any more than a single textual description is the key to that door. alt can be used to describe the purpose of an image, or the image itself but it isn’t the only way of doing either, nor would we want it to be. alt has many disadvantages as well as much in its favour. As long ago as 1999 we took the decision to remove alt tags and place the descriptions in the body of text in courses both because they were useful to all students and also because it made writing them much easier for expert authors who struggled to get to grips with the ‘extra’ alt tags.