This is an archive of past discussions. Do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to start a new discussion or revive an old one, please do so on the current talk page. |
Archive 1 | ← | Archive 4 | Archive 5 | Archive 6 |
I removed the note: "The screen reader emulator Fangs confirms this." Behaviours of screen readers changes, and are also made to produce as good results as it can despite a website's mistakes and poor quality. And there are other kinds accessibility hardware that behaves differently. An accessibility expert thaugh me testing with a screen reader is not sufficient and not reliable. We should comply to W3C'WCAG 2.0 techniques, and try to meet the AA accessibility level. That is all. Yours, Dodoïste ( talk) 20:03, 30 July 2010 (UTC)
{{ infobox NBA Player}} needs to be formatted to accommodate WP:ALT text. Ping me when this is done.-- TonyTheTiger ( T/ C/ BIO/ WP:CHICAGO/ WP:FOUR) 00:36, 7 September 2010 (UTC)
I guess the page got changed. It used to have good examples. Now the examples are to few and not super helpful. - Peregrine Fisher ( talk) 22:57, 10 September 2010 (UTC)
This suggestion is never appropriate as alt text, and is in no way supported by the reference attached to it. Pretty troubling that it's been part of this page for so long. Unless I'm missing something critical, this should be removed. Chris Cunningham (user:thumperward: not at work) - talk 09:18, 9 October 2010 (UTC)
Has anybody noticed if you use alt= it no longer works but Alt= does. REVUpminster ( talk) 00:15, 8 December 2010 (UTC)
See Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2011-05-02/Technology report. I was the one who reported bugzilla:18682 a long time ago, and I'm very thankful to the developers for finally fixing it.
We'll soon be able to add alt text to our galleries. It's not live yet, though. It should go live a the next MediaWiki update, and I'm not sure when this will happen. Anyway, keep an eye on it, and see if it gets enabled in a near future. Yours, Dodoïste ( talk) 07:52, 3 May 2011 (UTC)
One of your examples is "alt=Tony Blair and George W. Bush shaking hands at a press conference. " I'm in the habit of removing the period from such alt captions because it isn't a complete sentence, according to MOS:CAPTION. However, this page also says "link graphic Tony Blair and George W. Bush shaking hands at a press conference. Blair and Bush agree on a strategy for peace in the Middle East on 12 November 2004." Is that how it appears to a blind person? If so, then we need the period after "conference", because the "Blair and Bush" sentence appears immediately afterwards with no other punctuation. Art LaPella ( talk) 14:35, 8 July 2011 (UTC)
Unless the alt text provides a pixel-by-pixel description of the image, the above statement, taken from the introductory paragraph, is simply not possible. A description can serve the same general purpose as the image, but it is not technically accurate to say that it conveys the same information. In addition, having no images, whether because of visual impairment or other reasons, is already a loss of functionality outside our control. Effective alt text can reduce its impact, but we should not pretend that we can eliminate it. Feezo (send a signal | watch the sky) 20:27, 30 July 2011 (UTC)
If a browser tries to obtain an image, but fails, and the image has alt text, the browser may display the alt text instead. I think we should mention that.
To illustrate the display of alt text, I have created File:Metropolitan Railway, Praed Street Junction alt text.PNG. This is a screenshot that I took from Metropolitan Railway when the lead image File:Metropolitan Railway, Praed Street Junction.jpg failed to load because of a slow server. -- Redrose64 ( talk) 21:10, 26 April 2012 (UTC)
At the accessibility workshop I went to last year at Wikimania, one of the chief complaints from blind users was our over-use of alt text. According to these users, in most cases the captions are sufficient to explain the gist of the image, and having to listen to both the alt text and the caption is often redundant and tedious. For years, we've been emphasizing alt text so much that it has become a de facto requirement, even when it serves essentially no purpose. If we're really interested in serving the needs of blind readers we should pay attention to this feedback and change our guidelines to emphasize that alt text should only be added when the caption does not sufficiently describe the image. Otherwise we're just creating invisible cruft. Kaldari ( talk) 21:43, 6 June 2012 (UTC)
@ User:Kaldari - can you send the disgruntled vision-impaired users our way to participate in this discussion? -- Lexein ( talk) 21:09, 24 August 2012 (UTC)
There have been lengthy discussion about the correct use of alt text in the past, and specifically alt text length. Please see the archive 4 of this talk page, and especially the sections succinct in seven words and external reviews. Several advices were requested, notably from a Webaim professional if I remember correctly. Since then, this guidelines was significantly changed. We now encourage shorter alt text.
This past discussion harmed heavily our project at the time. I wish we could learn from it, and avoid another controversy. For now we do not have enough information and feedback to take a decision in favor of short alt text or long alt text. Pushing in favor either choice is not a good idea, what we need is a basis for our decision. This is specifically intended for Lexein: debates and points of views are welcome, but pushing your point of view in the articles is not a healthy thing for the project. I suggest we read these archived discussions, and request more input from screen readers and experts. I'll try to contact Webaim about this issue. Dodoïste ( talk) 10:27, 1 September 2012 (UTC)
A patch has been submitted based on a review of accessibility that might benefit from your input. Please see https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=34750. — TheDJ ( talk • contribs) 07:55, 3 July 2012 (UTC)
The FireFox "Popup Alt Attribute" add-on is helpful when mousing over article images, for sighted users. -- Lexein ( talk) 07:03, 25 August 2012 (UTC)
-- Lexein ( talk) 11:48, 27 August 2012 (UTC)
Discussion of articles with recently changed alt text, focused on the merits of the alt text, and the changes to it.
Added longer alt text in examples. (Note: their "caption" is alt, their "text" is caption). Comments? -- Lexein ( talk) 16:25, 26 August 2012 (UTC)
Pre-existing example of very long alt texts. In a table of space station component modules, the alt text is mostly replicated in pairs line-drawings and photographs. Comments?-- Lexein ( talk) 04:16, 28 August 2012 (UTC)
In The Pirate Bay#Projects I added alt text to three cartoons, which at first were very long, but are now shorter, per Talk there. Suggestions appreciated, because cartoons are a class of WP:ALT "images with text" with a lot of text. -- Lexein ( talk) 13:47, 30 August 2012 (UTC)
Added restrained alt text to the two images. -- Lexein ( talk) 13:14, 31 August 2012 (UTC)
At WT:Route diagram template#About disabling link, there is a discussion on what the alternative text for little icons (such as , ) should be, or if they should be there at all. The discussion arose after we decided to remove a hard-to-manage automatic alternative text template. Please take time to give your comment there, thanks. – PeterCX& Talk 12:12, 28 March 2013 (UTC)
This page fails the accessibility check using the Wave tool provided by WebAIM.- see http://wave.webaim.org/report#/http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:ALT.
Several of the errors seem to relate to missing Alt text on the little "Enlarge" icon at the bottom right of each image. Can something be done about this? rossb ( talk) 11:25, 25 June 2013 (UTC)
What kind of alternative text should be provided with a logo? A section discussing this rule should be added to the guideline. - Rahat | Message 13:52, 19 October 2013 (UTC)
Per WP:CAPTION#Formatting and punctuation, image captions generally do not have period, unless they are full sentences. What about the alt text? Would omission of the period cause any technical problems with readers? -- Eleassar my talk 12:40, 10 September 2013 (UTC)
Something that came up at Taylor Swift discography [3]. The Alt text was "A blond-haired Caucasian woman smiles." This is of course ridiculous and serves no purpose at all. How about a change that says when showing a picture of someone the article is about, mention their name, don't just give vague descriptions of their race and hair color. Although I don't see how having any alt text at all in cases like this would help blind people. Dream Focus 02:19, 1 February 2014 (UTC)
Hello, I just came upon this concept of providing alt descriptions for photos. I've attempted to do it for the article, Phoenix, Arizona, but am unsure I did it correctly. Could someone who is more conversant in this check that article, and let me know any corrections which might be needed? Thanks. Onel5969 ( talk) 17:45, 26 February 2014 (UTC)
I've noticed that when I move my cursor over an image that's part of an infobox that has "alt=|" in the "image=" portion of the infobox, the "alt" text displays in my browser. However, for images that just use the [[File:...]] method, even if the "alt" text is provided, it doesn't display when I move my cursor over the image. Any idea why it works when it's included in a template, but not in text? For examples, see Virginia Tech massacre; the text displays for the image in the infobox, but not for any of the other images. I've tested this with Google Chrome Version 34.0.1847.131 m and Firefox Version 29; the problem is present in both. Thanks!— D'Ranged 1 talk 17:28, 4 May 2014 (UTC)
I've always struggled with writing alt text, and most of the time I find myself either leaving it blank or just writing "refer to caption." I understand the examples used on this page, but I have a hard time putting it into practice. Could someone please help me? What would be appropriate alt text for Madonna's and Ted Bundy's images? Currently, they are: "A blond woman wearing a white shirt and black necktie" and "black-and-white photo of a man with piercing eyes", respectively. Thanks, Melonkelon ( talk) 10:56, 9 October 2014 (UTC)
"The alt text is read out by screen readers just before the caption, so try to avoid having the same details in both." Exactly that mistake is demonstrated in the Napoleon example ;-) -- Mosmas ( talk) 08:43, 19 October 2014 (UTC)
We have the following sentence in the section Captions and nearby text:
Where the caption does not describe or identify the image, but the image is merely decorative, the alt
text should contain the shortest possible description or identification of the image.
I can see no place at all for captions on merely decorative images - and [
H67] tells us that decorative images should have null alt text (|alt=""
). I'm going to remove that sentence. If there is some authoritative guidance on dealing with captions on merely decorative images, then it would be worth mentioning, but I suggest that the existing guidance in the
Links and attribution section (i.e. set |link=
|alt=
for decorative images that don't require attribution) is the correct advice. --
RexxS (
talk)
13:27, 20 April 2014 (UTC)
Where the caption does not describe or identify the image, but the image is merely decorative, then remove that image!
@media aural { .decorative { display: none; } }
<span class="decorative">[[File:PrettyPicture.jpg|People feel happier when they look at pretty objects.]]</span>
|alt=
so that any screen reader that didn't recognise the "aural" media type would still be able to deal with the alt text. How does that sound? --
RexxS (
talk)
15:28, 4 August 2014 (UTC)
|alt=""
)." I just edited the page to make this more clear. All images should have alt text. Decorative images should have alt="" so that a screen reader never reads the filename.
Banaticus (
talk)
19:08, 3 November 2014 (UTC)
alt=""
is equivalent to no alt text, as far as screen readers are concerned.
Graham
87
04:59, 4 November 2014 (UTC)
alt=""
is an empty alt text - I mean no alt text at all. In wiki syntax, alt=""
produces the following alt text : "". Which reads 'Quote quote'. It is most unhelpful.Posted at WP:VPT#Alt text statistics. — Dispenser 17:02, 30 August 2015 (UTC)
It looks like Dispenser ( talk · contribs)'s Altviewer tool is offline. Not sure if this is a temporary or permanent development, but is there an alternative in place that users can be directed to?-- Patrick, oѺ∞ 14:11, 27 October 2015 (UTC)
How does one apply this guidance to film posters? As art pieces they generally attempt to pack a lot of visual imagery which requires rather lengthy explanation to provide full context. For example, the poster for S/O Satyamurthy - is it just : "Allu Arjun and Samantha Ruth Prabhu in dance poses". Or do you describe the poses and clothing? Do you say they look happy (in some film posters, it is important that the people are looking pensive or angry)? How far does that stray into WP:OR? Do you mention the second small image at the bottom? How about the fact that the title is not in a flat line, but forms a "V"? -- TRPoD aka The Red Pen of Doom 15:07, 28 November 2015 (UTC)
All the examples end with a period. jonkerz ♠ talk 17:10, 24 May 2016 (UTC)
Hi, for some reason alt text on Wikipedia isn't working when I mouse over images when they appear in the body of the text (including the ones on this help page). Mouse over seems to work fine for infobox images though--is this a problem with my browser, or is it a known issue on Wikipedia? Thanks, Rachel Helps (BYU) ( talk) 16:15, 6 June 2018 (UTC)
A comment at the top of this old FAC prompted to look at WP:ALT, and I see the page does not agree with the advice given there, which is that "photograph" or "picture" is often the right alt text given that a screen reader will follow that with the caption. This seems more sensible than the current recommendation to provide a description. For example, the picture of Napoleon on WP:ALT has alt text of "Painting of Napoleon Bonaparte in His Study at the Tuileries" and a caption of "The Emperor Napoleon in His Study at the Tuileries by Jacques-Louis David". As I understand it, a screenreader would read out:
which is more verbose and no more helpful than
Am I missing something? Mike Christie ( talk - contribs - library) 12:44, 21 October 2018 (UTC)
OK, here's an attempt to outline a coherent set of edits that address this in a couple of places on the page.
-- Mike Christie ( talk - contribs - library) 22:17, 22 October 2018 (UTC)
I'm completely confused. At Wikipedia:Manual_of_Style/Images#How_to_place_an_image we're told that the dog image should have
alt=A white dog in a harness playfully nuzzles a young boy
.But here on this page, we're told that
alt
text should not be "an elderly woman wearing a black hat"and the image itself carries
alt=Elizabeth II speaking to the public
.It seems to me that the dog image is done correctly: the alt describes what a sighted reader would see, but a non-sighted cannot see i.e. alt = A white dog in a harness playfully nuzzles a young boy
. It also seems to me that for the QE image, the alt should be (and here I'm elaborating it a bit) alt=An elderly woman in a green dress and black fur hat smiles at a small group of people
and the caption (not alt) should be Elizabeth II speaking to the public
. Someone enlighten me.
E
Eng
22:11, 22 October 2018 (UTC)
[[File:Jacques-Louis David 017.jpg |thumb |alt=Painting of Napoleon Bonaparte in His Study at the Tuileries |''[[The Emperor Napoleon in His Study at the Tuileries]]'' by [[Jacques-Louis David]]]]
alt = Painting of Napoleon Bonaparte in His Study at the Tuileries
help a non-sighted reader, or indeed anyone? First of all, it's just a repeat of a subset of the caption. Second, even if was not a repeat of the caption, it tells the reader nothing unless he either (a) is familiar with that particular painting or (b) has at least some idea what Napoleon looked like. The whole point of showing the painting is the details of how the subject is presented, so it seems to me the alt should be something like alt = A neo-classical portrait of Napoleon, showing him as a dark-haired man in his early 40s wearing the uniform of a French admiral, his hand with etc etc.
(I made all that stuff up) -- exactly what you'd say is a complicated question, especially since there's so much you could say about this particular painting, it has its own article, various elements have symbolic or political significance, different readers (non-sighted readers, remember) will have different levels of familiarity with Napoleon and his time, and much more. So it's not an easy example for this discussion. But surely the alt recommended on the page now is completely senseless.
E
Eng
03:10, 23 October 2018 (UTC)
Izno, EEng, Graham87, any more thoughts on this? The advice in the lead still seems quite wrong to me. Why would we leave in place a recommendation for alt text that would lead to a screen reader repeating itself? I take Izno's point about making sure the caption is useful before cutting the alt text to just "painting", but in this case it is useful, and we shouldn't be recommending what we currently show in the lead. Mike Christie ( talk - contribs - library) 12:12, 31 January 2019 (UTC)
alt
, which I find fairly readable on the point of alt texts. We should echo or mirror the specification, given that it's been written with the other HTML elements in mind (specifically figure/figcaption, which we don't use today but which we will use at some point in the future). --
Izno (
talk)
14:15, 1 February 2019 (UTC)
The context for this comes from a BLP/N discussion on Ben Shapiro but the BLP factors don't matter, just the question that if we have an infobox picture of a person on their BLP article, with a known timestamp (eg like a photo taken in 2016), what are the appropriate alt and captions should be for that? It essentially comes down to the caption, some feeling that having the name in the caption ("X in 2016") duplicates the name at the top of the infobox, but then the question of how screenreaders "see" this came up. What generally should be preferred here for MOS and accessibility? -- Masem ( t) 21:48, 19 February 2019 (UTC)
A mammal on the planet Earth. They're both technically true, but equally irrelevant. The article is on an individual person, and the image has been chosen because it depicts that person, and because that person is doing something they are well known for, such as public speaking engagements. GMG talk 13:58, 24 February 2019 (UTC)
I'm probably late to this particular train, but I just discovered the capability to add alternative text for images. I attempted to do so for the images in this article. Then I tried listening to it with a screen reader, but the alternative text did not render. Did I mess it up somehow? Or is the problem with the screen reader I used? Would someone please either look at the Wikicode and tell me what I messed up or listen to it with a screen reader that they know renders alt text properly and tell me that it's fine? Thanks. ~ ONUnicorn( Talk| Contribs) problem solving 19:13, 12 March 2019 (UTC)
I made an edit to a couple of astronauts articles ( 1), adding alt text to the mission logos that are in the infobox. Should I have alt=[Mission] logo, alt=[Mission], or alt=""? It seems decorative to me since the mission names are just above it. I suppose I do not know how the infobox is navigated with software anyways. Thoughts? Kees08 (Talk) 22:50, 29 May 2019 (UTC)
Taking NASA Astronaut Group 4 as an example, there is typically a group photo and individual portraits of each astronaut.
For the group photo I was thinking maybe "Official group portrait" or "Astronaut group 4 portrait", but that runs a bit afoul of "All readers will be aware this element is an image, so adding "photograph of" isn't usually necessary." So maybe just "Astronaut group 4"?
For the individual portraits, I suppose "Firstname Lastname" would be sufficient, but that seems stupid since their name will be read very shortly afterwords. Is there anything logical I can do about that? Appreciate any feedback, I would like to apply this to a few articles so thought it would be worth asking ahead of time. Kees08 (Talk) 01:29, 16 June 2019 (UTC)
Is this a good way to write alt text for album art? Diff Kees08 (Talk) 17:22, 3 August 2019 (UTC)
Hello! The function to add alternative text to a mathematical formula does not work as described. Supporting information: [4] and an old discussion here: [5] -- Lpd-Lbr ( talk) 09:27, 17 September 2019 (UTC)
I recently had a discussion with a few main page curators, and decided I was going to try to consistently add alt text to TFA images. Many TFAs feature similar images (battleships, profile photos, animals), so the alt text should be pretty similar. I was hoping to propose a few for this month to see what you all think before I start adding them en masse to blurbs. November blurb list, which is where the photos for the below are located. I know some dates have passed, this is more an exercise in determining good alts for TFAs.
Pinging Graham87 due to past useful input. Kees08 (Talk) 23:50, 3 November 2019 (UTC)
At John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry#Other casualties, civilian and military there is an image incorporating both a drawing and a caption (from the original source) that describes it. I've transcribed the entire caption into the alt text, although I understand alt text is supposed to be short. Is this an appropriate approach, or would it be better to crop the caption out and render it as text in the main caption? Hairy Dude ( talk) 04:22, 30 May 2020 (UTC)
|alt=See caption
) over no alt text. But transcribing the original caption into alt text is also fine.I am adding an image with text in French and thought that I could add the text as alt text. Can I use {{lang}} to mark the text as French? What about other templates? -- Error ( talk) 22:57, 13 September 2020 (UTC)
When a blank alt attribute is desired, consider replacing CC-BY-SA images with public domain equivalents. I think it is highly problematic to deprecate CC-BY-SA in any way. This could easily lead to lower quality images being used in articles when a perfectly acceptable CC image is available. If the public domain image is an improvement, it can and should be replaced anyway without any reference needed to accessibility. Spinning Spark 13:06, 11 January 2022 (UTC)
|link=
and |alt=
blank usefully suppresses the screenreader from reading out the file name, but not so usefully, prevents clicking the image linking to the image page. Linking to the image page is a requirement for attribution of copyrighted images, therefore this must not be done on such images and consequently alt text must exist to suppress the file name being read. However, the text is opaque to say the least and I might have got that completely wrong.
Spinning
Spark
13:36, 11 January 2022 (UTC)The page currently states All readers will be aware this element is an image, so adding "photograph of" isn't usually necessary. No, they won't, diagrams are often uploaded in .jpg
or .png
formats (although .svg
is preferred). These are the most common formats for uploading photographs. Thus, it is useful/important to include |alt=photograph
if that information cannot be divined from the caption.
Spinning
Spark
12:53, 11 January 2022 (UTC)
This is an archive of past discussions. Do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to start a new discussion or revive an old one, please do so on the current talk page. |
Archive 1 | ← | Archive 4 | Archive 5 | Archive 6 |
I removed the note: "The screen reader emulator Fangs confirms this." Behaviours of screen readers changes, and are also made to produce as good results as it can despite a website's mistakes and poor quality. And there are other kinds accessibility hardware that behaves differently. An accessibility expert thaugh me testing with a screen reader is not sufficient and not reliable. We should comply to W3C'WCAG 2.0 techniques, and try to meet the AA accessibility level. That is all. Yours, Dodoïste ( talk) 20:03, 30 July 2010 (UTC)
{{ infobox NBA Player}} needs to be formatted to accommodate WP:ALT text. Ping me when this is done.-- TonyTheTiger ( T/ C/ BIO/ WP:CHICAGO/ WP:FOUR) 00:36, 7 September 2010 (UTC)
I guess the page got changed. It used to have good examples. Now the examples are to few and not super helpful. - Peregrine Fisher ( talk) 22:57, 10 September 2010 (UTC)
This suggestion is never appropriate as alt text, and is in no way supported by the reference attached to it. Pretty troubling that it's been part of this page for so long. Unless I'm missing something critical, this should be removed. Chris Cunningham (user:thumperward: not at work) - talk 09:18, 9 October 2010 (UTC)
Has anybody noticed if you use alt= it no longer works but Alt= does. REVUpminster ( talk) 00:15, 8 December 2010 (UTC)
See Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2011-05-02/Technology report. I was the one who reported bugzilla:18682 a long time ago, and I'm very thankful to the developers for finally fixing it.
We'll soon be able to add alt text to our galleries. It's not live yet, though. It should go live a the next MediaWiki update, and I'm not sure when this will happen. Anyway, keep an eye on it, and see if it gets enabled in a near future. Yours, Dodoïste ( talk) 07:52, 3 May 2011 (UTC)
One of your examples is "alt=Tony Blair and George W. Bush shaking hands at a press conference. " I'm in the habit of removing the period from such alt captions because it isn't a complete sentence, according to MOS:CAPTION. However, this page also says "link graphic Tony Blair and George W. Bush shaking hands at a press conference. Blair and Bush agree on a strategy for peace in the Middle East on 12 November 2004." Is that how it appears to a blind person? If so, then we need the period after "conference", because the "Blair and Bush" sentence appears immediately afterwards with no other punctuation. Art LaPella ( talk) 14:35, 8 July 2011 (UTC)
Unless the alt text provides a pixel-by-pixel description of the image, the above statement, taken from the introductory paragraph, is simply not possible. A description can serve the same general purpose as the image, but it is not technically accurate to say that it conveys the same information. In addition, having no images, whether because of visual impairment or other reasons, is already a loss of functionality outside our control. Effective alt text can reduce its impact, but we should not pretend that we can eliminate it. Feezo (send a signal | watch the sky) 20:27, 30 July 2011 (UTC)
If a browser tries to obtain an image, but fails, and the image has alt text, the browser may display the alt text instead. I think we should mention that.
To illustrate the display of alt text, I have created File:Metropolitan Railway, Praed Street Junction alt text.PNG. This is a screenshot that I took from Metropolitan Railway when the lead image File:Metropolitan Railway, Praed Street Junction.jpg failed to load because of a slow server. -- Redrose64 ( talk) 21:10, 26 April 2012 (UTC)
At the accessibility workshop I went to last year at Wikimania, one of the chief complaints from blind users was our over-use of alt text. According to these users, in most cases the captions are sufficient to explain the gist of the image, and having to listen to both the alt text and the caption is often redundant and tedious. For years, we've been emphasizing alt text so much that it has become a de facto requirement, even when it serves essentially no purpose. If we're really interested in serving the needs of blind readers we should pay attention to this feedback and change our guidelines to emphasize that alt text should only be added when the caption does not sufficiently describe the image. Otherwise we're just creating invisible cruft. Kaldari ( talk) 21:43, 6 June 2012 (UTC)
@ User:Kaldari - can you send the disgruntled vision-impaired users our way to participate in this discussion? -- Lexein ( talk) 21:09, 24 August 2012 (UTC)
There have been lengthy discussion about the correct use of alt text in the past, and specifically alt text length. Please see the archive 4 of this talk page, and especially the sections succinct in seven words and external reviews. Several advices were requested, notably from a Webaim professional if I remember correctly. Since then, this guidelines was significantly changed. We now encourage shorter alt text.
This past discussion harmed heavily our project at the time. I wish we could learn from it, and avoid another controversy. For now we do not have enough information and feedback to take a decision in favor of short alt text or long alt text. Pushing in favor either choice is not a good idea, what we need is a basis for our decision. This is specifically intended for Lexein: debates and points of views are welcome, but pushing your point of view in the articles is not a healthy thing for the project. I suggest we read these archived discussions, and request more input from screen readers and experts. I'll try to contact Webaim about this issue. Dodoïste ( talk) 10:27, 1 September 2012 (UTC)
A patch has been submitted based on a review of accessibility that might benefit from your input. Please see https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=34750. — TheDJ ( talk • contribs) 07:55, 3 July 2012 (UTC)
The FireFox "Popup Alt Attribute" add-on is helpful when mousing over article images, for sighted users. -- Lexein ( talk) 07:03, 25 August 2012 (UTC)
-- Lexein ( talk) 11:48, 27 August 2012 (UTC)
Discussion of articles with recently changed alt text, focused on the merits of the alt text, and the changes to it.
Added longer alt text in examples. (Note: their "caption" is alt, their "text" is caption). Comments? -- Lexein ( talk) 16:25, 26 August 2012 (UTC)
Pre-existing example of very long alt texts. In a table of space station component modules, the alt text is mostly replicated in pairs line-drawings and photographs. Comments?-- Lexein ( talk) 04:16, 28 August 2012 (UTC)
In The Pirate Bay#Projects I added alt text to three cartoons, which at first were very long, but are now shorter, per Talk there. Suggestions appreciated, because cartoons are a class of WP:ALT "images with text" with a lot of text. -- Lexein ( talk) 13:47, 30 August 2012 (UTC)
Added restrained alt text to the two images. -- Lexein ( talk) 13:14, 31 August 2012 (UTC)
At WT:Route diagram template#About disabling link, there is a discussion on what the alternative text for little icons (such as , ) should be, or if they should be there at all. The discussion arose after we decided to remove a hard-to-manage automatic alternative text template. Please take time to give your comment there, thanks. – PeterCX& Talk 12:12, 28 March 2013 (UTC)
This page fails the accessibility check using the Wave tool provided by WebAIM.- see http://wave.webaim.org/report#/http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:ALT.
Several of the errors seem to relate to missing Alt text on the little "Enlarge" icon at the bottom right of each image. Can something be done about this? rossb ( talk) 11:25, 25 June 2013 (UTC)
What kind of alternative text should be provided with a logo? A section discussing this rule should be added to the guideline. - Rahat | Message 13:52, 19 October 2013 (UTC)
Per WP:CAPTION#Formatting and punctuation, image captions generally do not have period, unless they are full sentences. What about the alt text? Would omission of the period cause any technical problems with readers? -- Eleassar my talk 12:40, 10 September 2013 (UTC)
Something that came up at Taylor Swift discography [3]. The Alt text was "A blond-haired Caucasian woman smiles." This is of course ridiculous and serves no purpose at all. How about a change that says when showing a picture of someone the article is about, mention their name, don't just give vague descriptions of their race and hair color. Although I don't see how having any alt text at all in cases like this would help blind people. Dream Focus 02:19, 1 February 2014 (UTC)
Hello, I just came upon this concept of providing alt descriptions for photos. I've attempted to do it for the article, Phoenix, Arizona, but am unsure I did it correctly. Could someone who is more conversant in this check that article, and let me know any corrections which might be needed? Thanks. Onel5969 ( talk) 17:45, 26 February 2014 (UTC)
I've noticed that when I move my cursor over an image that's part of an infobox that has "alt=|" in the "image=" portion of the infobox, the "alt" text displays in my browser. However, for images that just use the [[File:...]] method, even if the "alt" text is provided, it doesn't display when I move my cursor over the image. Any idea why it works when it's included in a template, but not in text? For examples, see Virginia Tech massacre; the text displays for the image in the infobox, but not for any of the other images. I've tested this with Google Chrome Version 34.0.1847.131 m and Firefox Version 29; the problem is present in both. Thanks!— D'Ranged 1 talk 17:28, 4 May 2014 (UTC)
I've always struggled with writing alt text, and most of the time I find myself either leaving it blank or just writing "refer to caption." I understand the examples used on this page, but I have a hard time putting it into practice. Could someone please help me? What would be appropriate alt text for Madonna's and Ted Bundy's images? Currently, they are: "A blond woman wearing a white shirt and black necktie" and "black-and-white photo of a man with piercing eyes", respectively. Thanks, Melonkelon ( talk) 10:56, 9 October 2014 (UTC)
"The alt text is read out by screen readers just before the caption, so try to avoid having the same details in both." Exactly that mistake is demonstrated in the Napoleon example ;-) -- Mosmas ( talk) 08:43, 19 October 2014 (UTC)
We have the following sentence in the section Captions and nearby text:
Where the caption does not describe or identify the image, but the image is merely decorative, the alt
text should contain the shortest possible description or identification of the image.
I can see no place at all for captions on merely decorative images - and [
H67] tells us that decorative images should have null alt text (|alt=""
). I'm going to remove that sentence. If there is some authoritative guidance on dealing with captions on merely decorative images, then it would be worth mentioning, but I suggest that the existing guidance in the
Links and attribution section (i.e. set |link=
|alt=
for decorative images that don't require attribution) is the correct advice. --
RexxS (
talk)
13:27, 20 April 2014 (UTC)
Where the caption does not describe or identify the image, but the image is merely decorative, then remove that image!
@media aural { .decorative { display: none; } }
<span class="decorative">[[File:PrettyPicture.jpg|People feel happier when they look at pretty objects.]]</span>
|alt=
so that any screen reader that didn't recognise the "aural" media type would still be able to deal with the alt text. How does that sound? --
RexxS (
talk)
15:28, 4 August 2014 (UTC)
|alt=""
)." I just edited the page to make this more clear. All images should have alt text. Decorative images should have alt="" so that a screen reader never reads the filename.
Banaticus (
talk)
19:08, 3 November 2014 (UTC)
alt=""
is equivalent to no alt text, as far as screen readers are concerned.
Graham
87
04:59, 4 November 2014 (UTC)
alt=""
is an empty alt text - I mean no alt text at all. In wiki syntax, alt=""
produces the following alt text : "". Which reads 'Quote quote'. It is most unhelpful.Posted at WP:VPT#Alt text statistics. — Dispenser 17:02, 30 August 2015 (UTC)
It looks like Dispenser ( talk · contribs)'s Altviewer tool is offline. Not sure if this is a temporary or permanent development, but is there an alternative in place that users can be directed to?-- Patrick, oѺ∞ 14:11, 27 October 2015 (UTC)
How does one apply this guidance to film posters? As art pieces they generally attempt to pack a lot of visual imagery which requires rather lengthy explanation to provide full context. For example, the poster for S/O Satyamurthy - is it just : "Allu Arjun and Samantha Ruth Prabhu in dance poses". Or do you describe the poses and clothing? Do you say they look happy (in some film posters, it is important that the people are looking pensive or angry)? How far does that stray into WP:OR? Do you mention the second small image at the bottom? How about the fact that the title is not in a flat line, but forms a "V"? -- TRPoD aka The Red Pen of Doom 15:07, 28 November 2015 (UTC)
All the examples end with a period. jonkerz ♠ talk 17:10, 24 May 2016 (UTC)
Hi, for some reason alt text on Wikipedia isn't working when I mouse over images when they appear in the body of the text (including the ones on this help page). Mouse over seems to work fine for infobox images though--is this a problem with my browser, or is it a known issue on Wikipedia? Thanks, Rachel Helps (BYU) ( talk) 16:15, 6 June 2018 (UTC)
A comment at the top of this old FAC prompted to look at WP:ALT, and I see the page does not agree with the advice given there, which is that "photograph" or "picture" is often the right alt text given that a screen reader will follow that with the caption. This seems more sensible than the current recommendation to provide a description. For example, the picture of Napoleon on WP:ALT has alt text of "Painting of Napoleon Bonaparte in His Study at the Tuileries" and a caption of "The Emperor Napoleon in His Study at the Tuileries by Jacques-Louis David". As I understand it, a screenreader would read out:
which is more verbose and no more helpful than
Am I missing something? Mike Christie ( talk - contribs - library) 12:44, 21 October 2018 (UTC)
OK, here's an attempt to outline a coherent set of edits that address this in a couple of places on the page.
-- Mike Christie ( talk - contribs - library) 22:17, 22 October 2018 (UTC)
I'm completely confused. At Wikipedia:Manual_of_Style/Images#How_to_place_an_image we're told that the dog image should have
alt=A white dog in a harness playfully nuzzles a young boy
.But here on this page, we're told that
alt
text should not be "an elderly woman wearing a black hat"and the image itself carries
alt=Elizabeth II speaking to the public
.It seems to me that the dog image is done correctly: the alt describes what a sighted reader would see, but a non-sighted cannot see i.e. alt = A white dog in a harness playfully nuzzles a young boy
. It also seems to me that for the QE image, the alt should be (and here I'm elaborating it a bit) alt=An elderly woman in a green dress and black fur hat smiles at a small group of people
and the caption (not alt) should be Elizabeth II speaking to the public
. Someone enlighten me.
E
Eng
22:11, 22 October 2018 (UTC)
[[File:Jacques-Louis David 017.jpg |thumb |alt=Painting of Napoleon Bonaparte in His Study at the Tuileries |''[[The Emperor Napoleon in His Study at the Tuileries]]'' by [[Jacques-Louis David]]]]
alt = Painting of Napoleon Bonaparte in His Study at the Tuileries
help a non-sighted reader, or indeed anyone? First of all, it's just a repeat of a subset of the caption. Second, even if was not a repeat of the caption, it tells the reader nothing unless he either (a) is familiar with that particular painting or (b) has at least some idea what Napoleon looked like. The whole point of showing the painting is the details of how the subject is presented, so it seems to me the alt should be something like alt = A neo-classical portrait of Napoleon, showing him as a dark-haired man in his early 40s wearing the uniform of a French admiral, his hand with etc etc.
(I made all that stuff up) -- exactly what you'd say is a complicated question, especially since there's so much you could say about this particular painting, it has its own article, various elements have symbolic or political significance, different readers (non-sighted readers, remember) will have different levels of familiarity with Napoleon and his time, and much more. So it's not an easy example for this discussion. But surely the alt recommended on the page now is completely senseless.
E
Eng
03:10, 23 October 2018 (UTC)
Izno, EEng, Graham87, any more thoughts on this? The advice in the lead still seems quite wrong to me. Why would we leave in place a recommendation for alt text that would lead to a screen reader repeating itself? I take Izno's point about making sure the caption is useful before cutting the alt text to just "painting", but in this case it is useful, and we shouldn't be recommending what we currently show in the lead. Mike Christie ( talk - contribs - library) 12:12, 31 January 2019 (UTC)
alt
, which I find fairly readable on the point of alt texts. We should echo or mirror the specification, given that it's been written with the other HTML elements in mind (specifically figure/figcaption, which we don't use today but which we will use at some point in the future). --
Izno (
talk)
14:15, 1 February 2019 (UTC)
The context for this comes from a BLP/N discussion on Ben Shapiro but the BLP factors don't matter, just the question that if we have an infobox picture of a person on their BLP article, with a known timestamp (eg like a photo taken in 2016), what are the appropriate alt and captions should be for that? It essentially comes down to the caption, some feeling that having the name in the caption ("X in 2016") duplicates the name at the top of the infobox, but then the question of how screenreaders "see" this came up. What generally should be preferred here for MOS and accessibility? -- Masem ( t) 21:48, 19 February 2019 (UTC)
A mammal on the planet Earth. They're both technically true, but equally irrelevant. The article is on an individual person, and the image has been chosen because it depicts that person, and because that person is doing something they are well known for, such as public speaking engagements. GMG talk 13:58, 24 February 2019 (UTC)
I'm probably late to this particular train, but I just discovered the capability to add alternative text for images. I attempted to do so for the images in this article. Then I tried listening to it with a screen reader, but the alternative text did not render. Did I mess it up somehow? Or is the problem with the screen reader I used? Would someone please either look at the Wikicode and tell me what I messed up or listen to it with a screen reader that they know renders alt text properly and tell me that it's fine? Thanks. ~ ONUnicorn( Talk| Contribs) problem solving 19:13, 12 March 2019 (UTC)
I made an edit to a couple of astronauts articles ( 1), adding alt text to the mission logos that are in the infobox. Should I have alt=[Mission] logo, alt=[Mission], or alt=""? It seems decorative to me since the mission names are just above it. I suppose I do not know how the infobox is navigated with software anyways. Thoughts? Kees08 (Talk) 22:50, 29 May 2019 (UTC)
Taking NASA Astronaut Group 4 as an example, there is typically a group photo and individual portraits of each astronaut.
For the group photo I was thinking maybe "Official group portrait" or "Astronaut group 4 portrait", but that runs a bit afoul of "All readers will be aware this element is an image, so adding "photograph of" isn't usually necessary." So maybe just "Astronaut group 4"?
For the individual portraits, I suppose "Firstname Lastname" would be sufficient, but that seems stupid since their name will be read very shortly afterwords. Is there anything logical I can do about that? Appreciate any feedback, I would like to apply this to a few articles so thought it would be worth asking ahead of time. Kees08 (Talk) 01:29, 16 June 2019 (UTC)
Is this a good way to write alt text for album art? Diff Kees08 (Talk) 17:22, 3 August 2019 (UTC)
Hello! The function to add alternative text to a mathematical formula does not work as described. Supporting information: [4] and an old discussion here: [5] -- Lpd-Lbr ( talk) 09:27, 17 September 2019 (UTC)
I recently had a discussion with a few main page curators, and decided I was going to try to consistently add alt text to TFA images. Many TFAs feature similar images (battleships, profile photos, animals), so the alt text should be pretty similar. I was hoping to propose a few for this month to see what you all think before I start adding them en masse to blurbs. November blurb list, which is where the photos for the below are located. I know some dates have passed, this is more an exercise in determining good alts for TFAs.
Pinging Graham87 due to past useful input. Kees08 (Talk) 23:50, 3 November 2019 (UTC)
At John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry#Other casualties, civilian and military there is an image incorporating both a drawing and a caption (from the original source) that describes it. I've transcribed the entire caption into the alt text, although I understand alt text is supposed to be short. Is this an appropriate approach, or would it be better to crop the caption out and render it as text in the main caption? Hairy Dude ( talk) 04:22, 30 May 2020 (UTC)
|alt=See caption
) over no alt text. But transcribing the original caption into alt text is also fine.I am adding an image with text in French and thought that I could add the text as alt text. Can I use {{lang}} to mark the text as French? What about other templates? -- Error ( talk) 22:57, 13 September 2020 (UTC)
When a blank alt attribute is desired, consider replacing CC-BY-SA images with public domain equivalents. I think it is highly problematic to deprecate CC-BY-SA in any way. This could easily lead to lower quality images being used in articles when a perfectly acceptable CC image is available. If the public domain image is an improvement, it can and should be replaced anyway without any reference needed to accessibility. Spinning Spark 13:06, 11 January 2022 (UTC)
|link=
and |alt=
blank usefully suppresses the screenreader from reading out the file name, but not so usefully, prevents clicking the image linking to the image page. Linking to the image page is a requirement for attribution of copyrighted images, therefore this must not be done on such images and consequently alt text must exist to suppress the file name being read. However, the text is opaque to say the least and I might have got that completely wrong.
Spinning
Spark
13:36, 11 January 2022 (UTC)The page currently states All readers will be aware this element is an image, so adding "photograph of" isn't usually necessary. No, they won't, diagrams are often uploaded in .jpg
or .png
formats (although .svg
is preferred). These are the most common formats for uploading photographs. Thus, it is useful/important to include |alt=photograph
if that information cannot be divined from the caption.
Spinning
Spark
12:53, 11 January 2022 (UTC)