Accessibility - Alternative Text

Accessibility in website design is a big issue these days. Kiswebs website designers and developers always aim to design websites that are accessibly for our clients in Glasgow and throughout the UK.

The challenge facing website design and developers in Glasgow though is that technology and opinion often change. One such change in website browsers is the way the newest web browsers handle Alternative text or Alt text as the website design world tend to refer to it.

Alt text in website design is the text that you sometimes see when you hover over a website image. Having said that much depends now on the browser you use to view websites. The standard behaviour of the newest website browsers is for the Alt text NOT to display when you hover over the website image. Firefox and other browsers have not displayed the Alt text for many years but now the latest version of Internet Explorer will not display the Alt text for the website images.

So if you are wondering why your website images now no longer display this text the chances are it is because of the version of website browser you are using.

But why the change?

According to accessibility/HTML rules this text shouldn’t be displayed when rolled over. Essentially the text should only be shown when the image is missing and on text-only browsers or read out when people use text-to-speech software.

There is an alternative though. You can have the text hovering above the image but that requires the use of the title tag but these tags shouldn’t really be the same as they have different purposes.

If you want to find out more about title tags please let the team at Kiswebs know and we will explain more.