Art Museums & Alt Text
On Non-descriptive Alt Text
The alt text of some world-renowned art museums like the Metropolitan Museum of Art (Met) and Tate Modern contains an empty string. In web development, this implies that the images on their websites are purely decorative. Wait. How can images in art museums be decorative?
In web development, alt attributes give textual information about media. For the purpose of this blog, I will address alt attribute in image (<img>) tags, using examples from the Met. Alt text, the content of alt attributes, will be read by screen readers to users with temporal or permanent disabilities, by browsers when images could not load, or by the internet search engines. An example of an image tag with alt text is as follows:
<img src="pathToYourImage.jpg" alt="textual information">Some web developers would agree with me that writing alt text can involve uncertainty. What kind and how much information should I provide for images on my website? According to WebAim, alt text should depend on its context (WebAim has great examples to understand alt text if you need further references). It is tempting to think that alt text contains a description of images; however, alt text should not describe images. There exists longdesc attribute for an elaborated description of images. Alt text’s primary role is to convey both the content and function of images. If surrounding text holds information about images, then alt text should be left empty (or more precisely contain an empty string: <img alt = “ ”>).
For instance, let us take a look at Hippopotamus (“William”) at the Met.
The <img> tag of William’s photo consists of empty alt text. On the page, William’s image is surrounded by 282 word long textual explanation, a table with basic object information (period, dynasty, region, date, geography, medium, dimensions, credit line, and accession number), a one minute and forty one second long audio recited by a curator, and a list with more information on provenance, selected references, timeline of art history, and MetPublications. Since this page is about William, writing any information on the content of the image (i.e. on the museum object William) becomes redundant. Thus its alt text is empty. Note having empty alt text does not mean that alt text can be omitted. If alt text is missing, then screen readers, browsers, and search engines will read the path to images, which are usually poorly named (e.g. 12383229d-image.jpg). This example applies to images of the public domain at the Met. For images with restricted rights, the Met’s alt text reads as follows: “The zoom and download functions are not active for this image.” Here, alt text adds new information, which is not about the content of images but about their usage rights and restrictions.
The examples of the Met invite us to think carefully about user experience on a web page. Some art museums repeat the content of images in their alt text. Users would listen to or read the title, author, medium, period, etc, twice or sometimes more. Missing or having poorly written and redundant alt text can obscure user experience. Writing alt text, however, can be an abstract task. Most of the time, especially for non-museum websites, images are related to the websites’ content, but not supported contextually by their surrounding text. Even in museum websites, some objects are better explained than others. As WebAim points out, providing alt text does not involve being right or wrong. The key resides in considering context and establishing coherent user experience.
