smackfoo.com | I find your lack of faith disturbing.

I’d like to make a small public announcement.

If you develop code to do anything with web-based images, particularly involving Wordpress or TXP plugins, please do the universe a favour and ensure you follow both XHTML and Usability guidelines and make sure the ALT= attribute is included in any URI mark-up.

The W3C loosly define the ALT attribute as:

Specifying alternate text assists users without graphic display terminals, users whose browsers don’t support forms, visually impaired users, those who use speech synthesizers, those who have configured their graphical user agents not to display images, etc.

By not including it, you are potentially making life and the Internet just that little bit more bland — it’s also an instant FAIL for any XHTML standards.

A typical block of code for an image, following the ‘close enough’ philosophy:

<img src="demo.jpg" title="demo screen shot" />

I mean, just look at the amount of difference the following would make.

<img src="demo.jpg" title="demo screen shot" alt="screen grab as per paragraph 3" />

Not doing so hurts the Internet, it hurts me because it’s one more thing I have to do¹ to make sure content follows standards and it’s turning down the vibrancy by removing imagery information from a part of the online community.

Save the planet, use ALT.

1. manually adding alt=” tags sucks (↩)