People often say that I’m “the Web’s most famous blind user.” Well, let’s get this straight. I am not blind. Nor do I give a rat’s ass about your content.
My job is to collect content. And I can see. I see in code.
So let’s talk about a common practice with alternate content that irks me to no end. Even though I don’t care about your cat blog, I do read it. And you people do some pretty skeazy stuff. Sometimes it’s ignorant, and sometimes it’s not.
I read in the SEO forums that people puff their chests out proudly when they say that SEO helps with accessibility. But then they’ll go and pull crap like this:
<img src="/images/killer-bats.jpg" alt="Killer bats" />
How is that helping someone who can’t see a killer bat? Great, a picture of bats on the page about bats. Thanks for the information, douche.
What were the killer bats doing? Are they fluffy? How does it relate to the content? What job was the image doing on the page? Those are the questions that you should be answering in the alt attribute. Not, “What is it?” For those of us who can’t see, “what is it?” is about as helpful as your grandmother’s prophylactic stash.
Want proof that this is called good practice? Read Perfecting Keyword Targeting & On-Page Optimization by Rand Fishkin. Can you say “over-optimized?” I know what my cohorts do to content like this. We call it No Rank Town. Evidently management isn’t doing this guy so well.
And just because you have an image and the standards require an alt attribute, that doesn’t mean that you need to put something in the alt attribute. Again, how is this helping anyone out?
<img src="/images/spacer.gif" alt="spacer" />
C’mon, just do this so I can move along to actual content:
<img src="/images/spacer.gif" alt="" />
All in all, you guys suck at HTML. The next time you proudly call yourselves an “expert in accessibility” just because you know what an alt attribute is, you’ll know deep down how full of it you are. I hope that you whimper just a little bit at the end of your bragging. It may not be noticeable by others, but you’ll be aware, and that’s all that matters.
