Online dating site Mingle2 is offering a cool widget for your blog. You enter your blog's address, and it gives you a film-style rating based on its content.
What's My Blog Rated? thinks this blog is G rated. Here is the result when I copy and paste their suggested code into my blog entry:
Mingle2 - Online Dating
However, there's something wrong with this picture. Some of you will have already figured it out. The first tip on All Access Blogging, Label Your Images, showed how to add alternative information (called alt text) to images so that people visiting your site with screen readers or text-only browsers can tell what's going on.
Sighted readers see a film rating above.
People relying on the alt text hear or see "Online Dating."
My guess is that Mingle2 is trying to harness the alt text to influence search engine ratings by including their preferred term as alt text. Unfortunately, in so doing, they are going against the primary purpose of alt text, which is to provide alternative information for the image so people who can't access the image aren't left out. While I think it's fine (and generous) for Mingle2 to create a widget like this for bloggers in order to promote their site, breaking the alt text is NOT the way to do it.
If you're going to rate your blog, do your visitors with disabilities a favor and fix the code in this widget! Go ahead and paste it into your blog, but where you see this:
alt="Online Dating"
Replace it with something like this:
alt="This blog is rated G, click here to rate your blog"
Your new alt text will let your visitors know what's happening in the picture, and why the image is a link.
