LarrySequino Alt Text Sweep
Most alt text fails in one of two directions: it repeats the caption, or it describes pixels. Neither helps. The test is whether someone who cannot see the image ends up knowing what the sighted reader knows.
Procedure
- Inventory every image reference in the set, including ones inside partials and templates, which is where the untouched ones hide.
- Sort each into one of three buckets: informative, decorative, or functional (an image inside a link or a button).
- Informative gets the information, not the appearance. A bar chart's alt text is the finding the chart shows.
- Decorative gets an empty attribute, deliberately, so a screen reader skips it instead of announcing a filename.
- Functional gets the destination or the action, never the icon's name.
- Re-read the page with the images removed. Anything that now reads as a gap is an image whose alt text is still wrong.
Output
- The inventory, bucketed, with the current alt text beside the proposed one.
- The count of images that had no alt attribute at all.
- Any image whose meaning could not be determined from context, listed for the author rather than guessed at.