Thursday, November 3, 2016

website design - Is using the alt-attribute for text-as-graphics ok?


There are several ways to present text on your web page in exactly the font your designer decided; as an image, a flash hack, some javascript hack, dynamic fonts. But to this day, the only thing that seemingly works on all platforms is the old text-as-graphics solution. This is a kludge, of course, but for accessibility purposes, is using an image containing the text as an alt-attribute considered ok? Vision impaired users would get the text, as would search engines. Or am I missing something?



Answer



With some caveats.



  • If you change the image in the future, the alt attribute must also be maintained.

  • It would seem that search engines assign a higher value to actual text than an image with an alt attribute.

  • IMO, if you're using this for navigation, you'd be better off using @font-face or JavaScript to enhance a text menu rather than replacing it with images from the beginning.



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