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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.

Many tips for making your blog more accessible focus on making the blog work for visitors who are using screen readers or specialized browsers that can read a web page to the visitor. Many people who are blind use screen readers, and so do some folks who have low vision, mobility problems, and even some kinds of learning disabilities that affect their reading.

If you're curious about how these things work, check out The Visually Impaired Web User's Technology by the American Foundation for the Blind. It's a good, quick summary of what screen readers are and what they do.

The profile of Jackie on Mark Pilgrim's classic Dive Into Accessibility illustrates how technology such as screen readers can be used in a person's life.

If you want to know what screen readers sound like, check out the recordings posted on Access Matters. They are the results of a test case, which is linked from the page, where blogger Bob Easton tested several different ways of labeling images. (Remember last week's tip about labeling images?)

For something with a little more content, you can listen to this sample recording on an accessibility site at the University of Florida. You can hear how links in the screen reader they're using are read in a different voice, so they stand out from the text.

The brave can try out the Screen Reader Simulation at WebAIM. It requires the Shockwave plugin, and it takes a few minutes to load, but it's pretty awe-inspiring for someone who hasn't used a screen reader to try completing the tasks they lay out for you to accomplish as the web page is read aloud.

Keep in mind when you're listening to recordings of screen readers, though, that they may be slowed down so non-users can keep up!