Missing alternate text: GAAD count down!

To celebrate Global Accessibility Awareness Day, we will posting about common accessibility issues each day from today. Objective of this initiative is to let product owners know about how they are creating barriers to their users and how they can fix them. Let’s see how we could impact the world for this 6th edition of Global Accessibility Awareness Day.

To begin with, we will start with missing alternate text.

OK, what’s the alternate text anyway? Alternate text is information provided for as an alternative to images using <alt> attribute. Read our earlier post on “alt” – what, why, how and when? to learn more about alternate text.

We have tested a few websites from different segments and see how many of them are providing alternate text to images.

Government of India

• Government of India Home page has one image without alternate text. Appears to be a subscribe button.
• Supreme court of India home page has one image without alternate text. It’s a slider image
• Ministry of Electronics & Information Technology also has a subscribe button similar to Government of India home page and this too does not have an alternate text
• Ministry of Social Justice & Empowerment has two images without alternate text

Telecom Service Providers

• Bharath Sanchar Nigam Limited (BSNL) has 3 images without alternate text
• Airtel home page has alternate text for all images
• MTNL home page one image without alternate text
• Vodafone home page has alternate text for all images

E-commerce portals

• Flipkart home page does not have alternate text for a few images
• Amazon.in displays several shapes which does not have alternate text
• Tata Cliq has one logo image without alternate text
• Olx.in has alternate text for all images

Travel

• Indian Railway Catering and Ticketing Corporation (IRCTC) has 11 images without alternate text
• Abhibus home page has 2 images without alternate text
• Yatra.com has 8 images without alternate text
• Cleartrip home page has 14 images without alternate text

OK, can we campaign to have these websites (and others) learn and fix issues related to alternate text by 17th May, 2018 which is Global Accessibility Awareness Day?