Today I have a totally quick tip for you. Let's take a look at something that most of us should recognize:
This is a feed icon, followed by explanatory text. Looks fine, right?
Not quite. We know that images should have "alt text" that provide a text alternative for people who are listening to the blog with screen reader software, often used by people who are blind or have vision impairments. This feed icon DOES have alt text, which honestly I'm not sure if I added in a fit of thoughtlessness or if Feedburner generated it for me back in the day. But it needs to go, because it's exactly the same as the text that comes after it.
So what does a screen reader user hear?
Subscribe to my feed
Subscribe to my feed
I don't know about you, but that sounds a little needy to me. It's probably more dignified to just ask once.
So I'm leaving the alt piece of the code for the image, but I'm turning it into alt="" so the screen reader just passes it by without a sound.
If you generate a feed icon today using Feedburner, it does include a blank alt attribute. But I've seen plenty of funky feed stuff on blogs, so I suspect that it and other feed services, and even the defaults in various templates, have evolved over time.
So when you get a second, check on your feed icon and see if it needs a little sprucing up.
(Hat tip to the Accessibility Institute at the University of Texas for their article
Accessible Graphics.)
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