Recently I found a post which explores some of the limitations of automated website accessibility checking tools by building a site that scores a 100% on Google’s accessibility checker, while being completely inaccessible.
That post explores the very real limitations of automated tools. Tools like that can be useful, and help us by checking some of the low hanging fruit. But they never do a great job. For instance, just to highlight one obvious example mentioned in the post, here’s some examples of alt text on a logo which links to the homepage which would pass an automated check, but are really terribly inaccessible:
- alt=”logo”
- alt=”logo.png”
- alt=”Picture”
- alt=”The Lane Community College Logo”
- alt=”Lane Community College”
You know what some good alt text would be? “Visit the LCC homepage” – it’s a linked logo, so provide the purpose of the link.
When it comes to automated accessibility tools, use them to give you an idea of the overall accessibility of a page, but always double-check some items yourself – particularly ones that are difficult to for a computer to check, like link purpose.
Looking for more on alt text? Check out a decision tree for alt text