Alt Text, Less Can be More

Aaron Can­non at NorthTemple.com offers insight from the per­spec­tive of a blind user on the impor­tance of alt text. First from Aaron, as quoted by Ted Boren:

For some rea­son, some folks get it into their heads that being blind is really ter­ri­ble and the only way our lives can be whole is for us to have all the pretty pic­tures in the world described to us. Where, in actu­al­ity, most blind folks couldn’t care less about most of it.

Aaron then expounds:

…if there was a pic­ture of a man using a par­tic­u­lar prod­uct, I’m really not inter­ested in hear­ing “pic­ture of a man look­ing pleased as punch to be using the new ultra-lite USB hair drier,” or worse, “pic­ture of a man.” I really don’t care about what image the design­ers chose to use as eye-candy. I can’t see them, and descrip­tions of mean­ing­less images just waste my time and delay my get­ting to the infor­ma­tion I’m really inter­ested in.

Read the entire post for an apt com­par­i­son of web acces­si­bil­ity to bread mak­ing. Thanks Aaron, I’ll think twice the next time I feel an urge to wax poetic in my alt text.

Acces­si­bil­ity guide­lines make clear that null alt text should be used for images that do not con­vey mean­ing, dec­o­ra­tive images. Is the point at which an image goes from mean­ing­ful to mean­ing­less unclear to any­one else?