why has invision dropped alt tag for images ?

[sound]

alt tags for some images are no longer present in quite a few places now


this means that customers if wish to run sites without such errors being reported
then have to spend own time and effort in replacing these dropped tags

is there any valid reason why they no longer appear ?

http://dev.w3.org/html5/spec/the-img-element.html#alt

[Ryan H.]

"SEO."

The alt tags for those images would be constant and often-repeated strings of text; not particularly helpful for users, and detrimental to search engines which see that text as a keyword for the page [like 'icon'].

[Marcher Technologies]

The logo could at least use the given board name though... right?

If the logo is being used to represent the entity, e.g. as a page heading, the

alt

attribute must contain the name of the entity being represented by the logo. The

alt

attribute must not contain text like the word "logo", as it is not the fact that it is a logo that is being conveyed, it's the entity itself.

<img alt="Logo" src="http://community.invisionpower.com/public/style_images/master/logo.png?v=12345">

[YoungL]

To parse correctly alt tags are required, even if they are left empty. As it says in that document from W3C "A document can contain information in iconic form. The icon is intended to help users of visual browsers to recognize features at a glance. In some cases, the icon is supplemental to a text label conveying the same meaning. In those cases, the alt attribute must be present but must be empty."

For icons and things which are repeated or are just for layout purposes should have empty alt tags alt='' and not missing alt tags all together. According to W3C the alt tag is required for all images regardless of whether left empty or not in HTML 4.01, XHMTL 1.0 and HTML 5, having images with no alt tags will throw up parser errors as it does not comply with the DTD format.