Okay, okay. That was a very alarmist intro. There is no web developers’ apocalypse around the corner (not that I know of anyway, please don’t take anything I say about the apocalypse as read. I don’t want that responsibility.), nor are we going to have to regress to using tables and spacer GIFs again. The real issue here is that with all this new technology that keeps emerging and exciting web developers is unwittingly reimposing the restrictions of yesteryear…

Screen resolutions

Remember trying to break away from 800×600px?

With the movement toward a more mobile web, screen resolutions are in fact getting smaller. The iPhone’s maximum resolution is 480px, increasingly popular netbooks are set at about 1024px wide. Such a shift toward mobile and portable devices mean that screen sizes are actually getting smaller.

In my opinion, iPhones and other mobile devices should be handled separately, serving them device specific CSS. Netbooks on the other hand are still ‘desktop’ machines like any other. Their smallness is their key feature, and at 1024px horizontal resolution, they aren’t that small anyway…

With the 960 Grid System, and an optimum line length of 52–78 characters, sticking to 1024px shouldn’t be that difficult anyway. I believe that although desktop monitor sizes are generally getting larger, other equally important technologies are creeping up, and as responsible developers you should cater for them. Sure you may want to start adopting the 1080 grid, which is all well and good if you know your audience, but to cater for the majority, we’re not ready to burst 1024 yet.

Connection speeds

Remember building for 56k dial up connections? (I don’t)

Where permanent and fixed connections are getting much faster, connections to mobile devices through means such as 3G are much slower. The ability to optimise sites to be fast loading over such connections is getting more important. As edge-case resolutions are getting smaller, edge-case connections are getting slower. Much slower.

A word on Flash

Remember 2Advanced? A site of yesteryear…

Flash seems to be dying a death anyway these days, slowly being superseded by Javascript and Canvas et al. However, what was once a fantastically powerful technology has been ousted completely from Apple’s i products, making in an inviable option for content which needs to be universally accessible.

A real life example?

Anyone with an iPhone will know what I mean—spending any amount of time on an iPhone loading poorly optimised sites is a real grind, and via some sensible optimisation these problems can be easily alleviated.

However, a more interesting example might be the one that happened to myself… When we first started at Venturelab we really were building the company from the ground up. For the first few weeks we were without desktop machines and internet. I was working on a 10.1″ netbook with a screen resolution of 1024×600px, and over a poor 3G connection via a dongle.

“Accessibility isn’t just about disabilities, it’s about varying degrees of ability to access content.”

Working in this manner really made me wonder whether enough people are delivering content in a manner which is accessible on numerous levels. Accessibility isn’t just about disabilities, it’s about varying degrees of ability to access content. As responsible developers your content should be accessible through a full spectrum of means and in an acceptable manner.

All it takes is some decent optimisation (which is also set to reap SEO benefits) and a reasonable page layout and you’re already halfway there.

When not to use it

You should never not use an alt attribute, rather leave it empty, thus: alt=""

The only time you can really get away with not having a complete alt attribute is if the image holds no context or information that the user needs to be aware of. This is usually the case when the image is purely decorational, though it may be argued that the image should therefore be added through CSS in the spirit of separating style and content. By that token it is fairly safe to say that there should never be an instance in which you leave an alt attribute empty.

You’re using it, but not quite right…

The next best scenario is that you are using images correctly, for their correct purpose and are using alt attributes, but they don’t really do as much as they should. A lot of the time I come across images that have less than ideal alt attributes.

Image sourced via Google Images—original author unknown.

One example might be the above image of a car. This, while technically correct, is not ideal: <img src="/img/car.jpg" alt="Car" />. All this tells the user is ‘Car’. It doesn’t say whether it’s a picture with the word car in it, or whether it’s a picture of a car. A much better alt attribute would be alt="A photograph of an abandoned car" (as used in my code).

Other poor uses

Another real-world example of poor alt attribute usage is actually on CNN’s website. On their home page today (26 January, 2010) they have a series of headlines with accompanying images. The code for such a pairing looks like this:

<img height="68" border="0" width="120" alt="Haiti's swanky club →
now home to misery" src="http://i.cdn.turner.com/cnn/2010/WORLD/ →
americas/01/26/haiti.camp/tzvids.haiti.aid.cnn.jpg"> →
… Haiti's swanky club now home to misery

This is wrong on two counts:

1. A screenreader will read out to the user Haiti’s swanky club now home to misery … Haiti’s swanky club now home to misery. Every image/headline pairing on the page is laid out like this, meaning in every instance a user using a screenreader will hear the headline twice. This will surely soon get annoying.
2. Secondly, the image was actually of earthquake survivors holding a large bag, nothing to do with clubs and, unfortunately, far from swanky.

Using the attribute properly

On the BBC’s home page however (on the same date) they are using alt attributes perfectly. They have an image of a woman wearing a veil, alongside the article’s headline France report back face veil ban. The image’s alt attribute: alt="A woman wears a full-length veil in Lyon, 25 January".

The biggest no-no of all

One thing which consistently winds me up is the ridiculously bad practice of stuffing alt attributes with keywords. alt attributes are an accessibility feature, end of. They are not a way of slipping in keywords out of sight, and any attempt to do so is irresponsible and incredibly bad practice. The only time ‘keywords’ may be validly placed in alt attributes is if it’s explicitly related to the image; for example: <img src="/img/product.jpg" alt="A photograph of Mike's Carpets' ProClean™ carpet cleaner" />.

How to do it properly

Writing proper alt text is incredibly simple, yet a little more time consuming than the ‘Car’ cop-out. All you need to do is write out in full exactly what the image shows. If it’s an elephant giving a donkey a piggy-back don’t be lazy and use alt="Elephant and a donkey". Instead, write out alt="A photograph of an African elephant giving a donkey a piggy back across a swamp".

Also, for any pages that use similar images repeatedly but are slightly different to one another, make sure your alt attributes reflect these differences. A good example would be my portfolio page. Instead of using alt="Screenshot" over and over again I used text like alt="Screenshot of Suzanna Haworth’s website" and alt="Screenshot of RAAMaudio UK Ltd." etc.

This is one of the most basic aspects of web development, but one that too many people are still getting wrong.