If you’ve been keeping your eye on the online world, you may have heard about a pending lawsuit against retail giant Target. This suit is being brought about because Target failed to provide ALT tags on its website - which the plantiff states constitutes discrimination against visually impaired users.

Has Target missed the mark legally? I won’t comment on that, but what I CAN comment on is that Target’s web developers have missed the mark on a basic (and very easy to execute) best practice. From the W3C Website:

The alt attribute is defined in a set of tags (namely, img, area and optionally for input and applet) to allow you to provide a text equivalent for the object.A text equivalent brings the following benefits to your web site and its visitors in the following common situations:

• nowadays, Web browsers are available in a very wide variety of platforms with very different capacities; some cannot display images at all or only a restricted set of type of images; some can be configured to not load images. If your code has the alt attribute set in its images, most of these browsers will display the description you gave instead of the images
• some of your visitors cannot see images, be they blind, color-blind, low-sighted; the alt attribute is of great help for those people that can rely on it to have a good idea of what’s on your page
• search engine bots belong to the two above categories: if you want your website to be indexed as well as it deserves, use the alt attribute to make sure that they won’t miss important sections of your pages.

Besides allowing for accessibility and standards compliance, ALT tags also offer some benefit from an SEO perspective, providing context for spiders as to what your images represent. The exact SEO value of this is up for debate, and we ARE NOT suggesting stuffing every ALT tag with keywords - however, since it can’t hurt, will likely help, and opens up your site to visually impaired visitors, and is very easy to execute - you have no excuse not to do it!

If your site isn’t standards compliant, and you need some help getting there, feel free to contact us and we’ll help you out!

Spread the Word:  del.icio.us Digg Reddit

Posted by admin on Friday, October 12th, 2007 at 10:42 am.