Is using the alt-attribute for text-as-graphics ok?

Question

There are several ways to present text on your web page in exactly the font your designer decided; as an image, a flash hack, some javascript hack, dynamic fonts. But to this day, the only thing that seemingly works on all platforms is the old text-as-graphics solution. This is a kludge, of course, but for accessibility purposes, is using an image containing the text as an alt-attribute considered ok? Vision impaired users would get the text, as would search engines. Or am I missing something?

Answer 1

With some caveats.

• If you change the image in the future, the alt attribute must also be maintained.
• It would seem that search engines assign a higher value to actual text than an image with an alt attribute.
• IMO, if you're using this for navigation, you'd be better off using @font-face or JavaScript to enhance a text menu rather than replacing it with images from the beginning.

Answer 2

That's what alt is there for, for screen readers and robots

Answer 3

One of the biggest disadvantages with text-as-graphics is their inability to scale with text size (note: text size, not zoom). Sizing the image in ems might help to mitigate this.

Also, bear in mind that maintainability suffers greatly when using images, unless they're dynamically generated.

And, it's pretty inefficient to serve an image when all you want is a custom font - the file size of an image is a LOT greater than the equivalent text.

Answer 4

I see no problem with it. I've never heard anyone say that it's a bad idea. But try to avoid or do the following:

• making the entire content of a page an image (common mistake made by people who don't know what they are doing) -- this makes it hard for pretty much anything to parse, including search engines
• try to avoid it as much as possible -- it's aways better to have text for things that images; it just makes it easier for everything (copying a chunk of text, SEO, etc, etc)
• add both a an alt and title properties -- this ensures that when people roll over the image they will see the tooltip (because different browsers show different ones); I most do this on images that are links

Answer 5

Alt text's value is decreasing from SEO point of view, so it seems it we all can focus on accessibility and optimize alt text-s for screen readers.

As far as I know, it has only some percent influence on your SERP ranking

Answer 6

That seems like a brilliant solutions to me. Though I'm not an expert, as I've never though about the problem before today, and I've never experimented or used screen readers.

If all/most screen readers automatically read the alt text, and the reading flow throughout the page makes sense when using a reader, I'd say: Go for it!