Solutions: Website Accessibility Evaluation

SiteTechnician evaluates every page of your website to identify images that are missing ALT tags.

Every image on your website should contain an ALT tag. This is the single most important way to increase website accessibility and usability. If images on your site do not contain ALT tags, the 66% of all web users who access the Internet through dial-up connections might be unable to navigate your site. Many of these low-bandwidth users surf with images disabled as a way of retrieving pages more quickly. HTML protocols known as ALT tags assist these visitors in understanding and navigating through images, navigation bars and menus on your site.

Additionally, if your website does not employ ALT tags, you could be turning away the growing number of users who access the Internet through cell phones and PDAs--devices that do not offer full graphic support and rely upon ALT tags to assist navigation.

Furthermore, your site could be inaccessible to the estimated 10% of all web users that the National Institute on Disability and Rehabilitation Research identifies as disabled. Visually disabled web surfers navigate the Internet by using screen readers, which depend upon ALT tags to interpret images. Beyond the ethical considerations, there are good business reasons for making websites accessible to people with disabilities. Over 19% of the population (about 52.6 million Americans) live with some level of disability, including 8 million who are visually impaired. Together, America's disabled have over $175 billion in disposable income, according to an IBM study. Those numbers add up to too big an audience to ignore or alienate through a failure to include ALT tags for your images.

Finally, ALT tags may increase your rankings on important web crawling search engines. Google, Alta Vista, Lycos and InfoSeek index ALT tags.

Your ALT tags appear as mouse-overs when a visitor moves their mouse over the graphic. This can give extra information to your visitors. To see an example of how this works, simply hold your mouse cursor over the photograph to the left.

Want to see how your site appears to users accessing your site with images turned off, through wireless devices and PDAs, and to visually impaired visitors accessing your site with a screen reader? Click here.