Need relaxing option for empty alt check

[nschonni]

Alt tags may be left empty for decorative images http://dev.w3.org/html5/alt-techniques/#secm3
It would be good if to have a similar whitelist as the href check to exclude known valid images like "logo.png" where the content is purely decorative. In the decorative case, an empty alt tag prevents screen readers from reading the file name as a fallback.

[gjtorikian]

Interesting! I'll have to muse on this. Have you done this yourself? Do people usually use just alt, or alt=""?

I ask because it might be very hard to determine between an empty alt tag and a missing one.

[nschonni]

It is usually in the form of alt="" or alt=" ".
An example would be:

<img src="my-unrelated-stock-photo.png" alt="" />

I was thinking of a format like this:

HTML::Proofer.new("out/", { :alt_ignore => [ "my-unrelated-stock-photo.png", "my-logo.png" ] })

Then the space or no space value in the alt tag wouldn't be an issue, it would just short-circuit the lint.

[gjtorikian]

Ah, okay, cool. I was thinking of passing in an option but matching alt_ignore the same was as href_ignore makes more sense.

[LaurentGoderre]

actually, it should be alt="" because alt=" " is a non null alt and will not be ignored by assistive technologies