Comment by shakna
18 hours ago
I don't recall where, but I've heard that before in the past. Perhaps in the kind of slop that makes the rounds on LinkedIn.
There is sort of a good reason for it, in the past. Before the overhaul, Microsoft Speech used to skip Facebook posts, and read the alt text instead. It is now, however, more sane. Facebook was pretty darn bad at accessibility in its early days. A lot of intermingled broken spans for text, causing stuttering and other issues.
However, today, most reading systems prefer the "title" attribute, to the "alt" one. If title exists, it'll read that and skip alt. Some always skip alt, regardless of it exists or not.
Figure and figcaption are about the only way to get good and consistent behaviour, but you don't really control how those happen on most social media platforms. You throw everything you can at the wall, and see what happens. And it might change tomorrow.
Today, I'd say the above is bad advice. An image description is a good practice. Repeating yourself, isn't.
Thank you, that is quite informative.
The specific posts I see are from the Royal National Institute of Blind People who really ought to know.
What they do is add the image description at the end of each text post, even thought this matches the alt text.
This is the one about using alt text: https://www.facebook.com/rnibuk/posts/pfbid037RmtoSxfAJX82G4...
They do now have a comment on that one that explains their reasoning (I did not see it until just now).
Wait the title attribute?
What are you basing that on? Screen readers tend to not pick those up at least on interactive elements by default, you need to do a bit of "wiggling" to get those to be announced. Disclaimer: screen reader user
JAWS user, here. It will read both aria-label and title, on a button, which is an interactive element. [0]
It does depend on the verbosity, if you dial that down, you'll probably lose the title element. But for images, which is what I was mentioning, it should pretty much always be read out.
[0] https://github.com/FreedomScientific/standards-support/issue...
I am ... relatively sure JAWS reads out title attributes of images because people kept erroneously sticking important info there decades ago, I wouldn't say that's a generally accepted recommendation. Not entirely sure what NVDA would do with an image that has only a title but no alt set.
1 reply →