The Great Mess of Alternative Text
At Litmus Live 2017 in London
Published in
1 min readAug 31, 2017
This week, I once again had the pleasure to speak at Litmus Live in London. I gave a short talk about an Email Camera. But I also gave a longer talk called “The Great Mess of Alternative Text”. It’s a mix of some of my previous articles like How webmails block images, but with a lot of new content and research.
While I’m still working on a full text transcript, here are my slides and list of ressources and links mentioned during my talk or used to prepare my talk.
Links
- “I don’t see a problem with image-based emails”, tweet by Fabio Carneiro.
- “It’s called an alt attribute, not an alt tag” memes.
- “600px wide image” bad alternative text example (shared by Email Chic Geek).
- “Turns your images on” bad alternative text example.
- Chrome’s broken image cross-stitch (via this article).
- Images off pixel art examples: Transformers, Disney, McDonald’s, Lego.
- Supported styles in alternative text, by Thomas Defossez (in french).
- Styling Broken Images, by Ire Aderinokun.
- “If you ever code something that ‘feels like a hack but it works,’ just remember that a CPU is literally a rock that we tricked into thinking”, tweet by daisyowl.
Other ressources
- Who designed the “broken images” icons? on Quora
- The old Outlook.com images off rendering background hack, by Stig Morten Myre.
- Alt and title content display in popular browsers, by Steve Faulkner.
- Alternative Text, by WebAIM. (Excellent article to understand what content should or should not be an alternative text.)