Would it be better for Product Card & Carousel Image alt tags to be empty for accessibility?
I am working on an accessibility push for an ecommerce platform, and I am leaning towards empty alt tags for the product images. My primary reason the product name is on the card or the product page and we don't have specific descriptions for the different angles or lifestyle images. Also repeating the alt tag content is too verbose for screen readers and don't really add value.
These are major brand items and we get their data from them or scraping their website. Most are pretty poor at alt tags.
Any thoughts or experiences anyone would like to share?
4 Replies
just add a good alt description, and then use
aria-hidden on those images
alt attributes help a fair bit with seoAlt text is also what shows up on the page if the image doesn't load for some reason
oh, yeah, that too
That's a tricky question... If the text around the image describes the image, the w3.org alt text decision tree would lead me to to saying that empty might be a good idea: https://www.w3.org/WAI/tutorials/images/decision-tree/ (under Does the image contribute meaning to the current page or context, the 3rd option under "yes")
From a screen reader perspective, the repeated (or very similar) text is redundant. From a broken image perspective, same thing.