Judge Marilyn Patel of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California has approved a class action lawsuit against Target Corporation for not using HTML alt tags on their website images. About a year ago, a blind student in California sued Target.com, asserting that the retail giant’s website is inaccessible to the blind. That suit is now an approved class action lawsuit according to Judge Patel’s ruling, filed October 2.
The claim is that Target.com violates federal and state laws prohibiting discrimination against the disabled due to their lack of alt tags or text on images and the necessity of using a mouse to browse the page.
Who’s doing Target.com’s SEO? Image alt tags are a fundamental part of site optimization, because search engines can only read text. As an e-tailer, your site no doubt consists of text and images. Adding alt tags to those images allows them to be “read” by search engines.
Image tags are “attribute tags.” They tell the browser what attributes the image has, such as dimensional information, which allow your browser to keep a properly sized area open for the image, so faster loading text is formatted around the picture while the slower loading image downloads. When dimensional attributes are missing, the browser doesn’t know how much space to allocate for the image. Attribute tags also let visitors know an image is being formatted before it is displayed, so the image can be anticipated.
Additional attributes are “alt tags,” which provide “alternate text.” This text is displayed if the image can’t or doesn’t load properly. These alt tags are (should be!) descriptive of the image and relevant to the content surrounding the image.
Visitors to your site may use a browser with no image capability, such as a text-based browser on a Unix or Linux system, or they may have images turned off in their browser preferences so sites load faster, particularly if they are using a dial-up connection. Or they may be visually impaired. You can probably surmise how these tags help sight-impaired visitors. Blind people use text readers that can read them the image’s text description. Without these tags, or with a tag such as “pic1.gif” these tags are useless and meaningless to your sites’ blind visitors, which is the dilemma Target.com found themselves in, leading to this suit.
Presumably, Target.com will be forced to implement alt tags for their images. You can learn from Target’s stumble in this area by taking a look at your own site and formatting your images appropriately. Sure, it might take some extra effort, but the result will not only be an enhanced experience for all of your site’s visitors–which should really be the goal–but also an increased search engine relevancy. It’s worth the time.
Posted on October 8th, 2007 by Vanessa
Filed under: Search
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