Comments on: Little HTML mysteries… alt vs. title

By: Zeke Krahlin

Zeke Krahlin — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 05:24:49 +0000

I adapted to include both [alt] and [target] on my images. But:
New to WordPress, I have just discovered that when I save the draft of a blog entry, or publish it, the [alt] tag with accompanying text, is removed. The [title] tag remains as intended. That’s not too helpful when you might get fined or even arrested, in those nations where the [alt] tag is mandated by law!

By: Bikr

Bikr — Mon, 23 Mar 2009 23:10:04 +0000

If a site provides both, that should satisfy both needs, right?

I hate the fact that on Amazon.com, when I hover over a star rating image, I don’t get the “4.3 out of 5 stars” tooltip if I’m using any browser other than Internet Explorer. Amazon only sets the ALT attribute for their “star” images.

I wish Amazon would add the TITLE attribute so tooltips show up in other browsers. When searching for products with lots of ratings, the difference between 4.3 stars and 4.7 stars is significant, yet the actual image shows 4.5 stars.

By: James

James — Thu, 01 May 2008 12:45:41 +0000

I agree with you – there are important differences between the attributes you can use, their purpose and usage.

Unfortunately, the holy grail of website design for many business clients is consistancy – and that means consistant browser behaviour, modelled around Internet Explorer, and with backwards compatability. – So if alt tags make tooltips in IE, you can be damn sure they’ll want tooltips in Firefox 2, Firefox 1.5, IE 5.5 and IE 5.

Ah, the persistant legacy of progressive development.

Does the end justify the means?

By: Al

Al — Thu, 01 May 2008 10:18:30 +0000

I know I’m awfully late on this one, but there is a difference. Alt attributes are JUST for accessibility. They are meant to describe (not caption) an image. If you are providing a picture of your house, which happens to be a semi-detached blue house with ornate windows, the alt attribute describes just that. The title attribute is for captioning the picure – “My house” – and that’s why title gets a tooltip and alt shouldn’t.

When you think about it it makes sense, and kinda annoys you more. That means that if you like being WAI-compliant you now have to come up with a description and a caption for an image. And then there’s longdesc which I think can be either a very long thorough description or a link to a page that describes the image, but that’s not required.

Of course, the problem comes when you have images used for buttons or layout elements (horizontal rules, for instance). In my designs I tend to leave the title blank on layout images and use “[layout image]” for the alt text so that screen readers/mobile browsers/whatever know it’s not of any importance to the semantics of the page. I guess a CSS background is a better choice there. For buttons, e.g. one that says “search” on a quick search form, title is quite obvious “Search” or maybe “Search our site”. But the alt text is harder. Do you properly describe the image – “a button which has the text ‘search’ in blue on a light green background” – or simply describing the function – “Search”? I don’t know the answer there, although I go for the latter.