Popping up ALT text - the debate


Prominent website using ALT text as an image's description, with no equivalent image caption

Well, it's less of a debate and more of a stubborn resistance to the standards by people like... me.

What's 'meant' to happen (according to W3C standards) is that ALT text is displaed in place of images if they cannot be shown (or the user has simply chosen not to show them). If the webpage author wants some text, associated with an image, to be 'popped up' to a user, as something like a tooltip, even if they're viewing the image, the author should use the TITLE tag.

Internet Explorer (up to and including version 7) has long been displaying an image's ALT text in 2 ways - both in an image's "placeholder" (the box that appears instead of an image) whilst the image is loading or if 'Show images' has been turned off, and - importantly - in a tooltip when the user holds their mouse cursor over the image for a while.

Most other browsers, including Firefox and Opera, display the ALT text in the first way but not the second. If the image is not shown for whatever reason, the ALT text is displayed, but if it is, there is no easy way to get at the ALT text. This is the behaviour the standards say a browser should exhibit.

The problem with this is that, over time, many websites have been designed to use ALT text as the W3C standards say TITLE text should be used. Often, it's rather clear that the author would like all users to see the text they've entered as the image's ALT text, even if the user is viewing the image anyway. An obvious example of this is an image of a person or people. The ALT text associated with the image may contain the name(s) of the person(s) in the image. At the time of writing, a major example of this design is the bbc.co.uk website, especially the news section at bbc.co.uk/news. Frequently, useful information about a story, or an image associated with the story, will be embedded inside an image's ALT text. It would therefore be useful to view this information, even with the images showing.

The other argument, of course, is that it's actually a good thing that ALT text is displayed when images load, because it encourages webmasters to add it to images. This is an argument that I make. Without the ALT text popping up when the majority of visitors (using Internet Explorer) hovered their mouse cursor over images on the site, would the BBC have as much useful ALT text on their site? I very much doubt it. In this way, the browser's displaying of ALT text (as tooltip popups for loaded images as well as a replacement for unloaded images) helps the accessibility of the web because it encourages the use of ALT tags.

The major argument against the one I've outlined above is that text you would want to display to visitors with graphical browsers (TITLE text) is often going to be less than useful for visitors who can't see the associated image - eg. An image of a sunrise, with ALT text such as "Isn't that red sky beautiful?". The ALT text should describe the image in more detail, and this kind of comment that relies on seeing the image should be the TITLE text. Perhaps this is true; however, I personally think this is a weak argument and that the positives of the browser showing ALT text to all users strongly outweigh the negatives. It is for that reason that this extension provides the option to popup ALT text for all images that have the ALT attribute set. :-)

---

- Home