Contents of Toggle Images/ALT

Lecture Notes

The Toggle Image/Alt pulldown menu under Images, will reformat the page and replace images with what is in the ALT tag. If there is nothing in the ALT tag, no alt will be placed next to that image.

At the very top of this screenshot, you will notice that there are two quotes. This shows a type of image that is often used by Webmasters to control the layout of a page. These images are called spacers. They are not visible at all. They have no meaning to the content of the page. They simply allow Webmasters to position thing on a page for cosmetic reasons.

A screen reader has no idea what an image is used for and spacer images will be announced to the user as IMAGE if there is no ALT tag. So how are images like this handled? Speech users don't care about spacer images. As a sighted person you really don't either. Since spacer images are the same color as the background of the page or they are transparent, you don't even know they are there. There is a way of handling this situation so that screen reader users don't know they are there either. All that needs to be done is to put a space in the ALT tag. The technical term for this is a NULL ALT TAG. It looks like this. alt=" ". With the space in the ALT tag, screen readers will pass by the image and treat it like it was not even there.