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A comment on Annoying website features I face as a blind person. Parent comment

Re:Annoying website features I face as a blind person by bryanrasmussen on Thursday September 10, 2020 @05:20AM (#24430409)
>but if there were a time when empty alt attributes caused problems, it was back in the 90s.

Maybe my memory is off but I think up until the middle of the first decade of this century empty alt text was not good for screen readers, although maybe that was just because you always have to take into account older screen readers still in use.

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Re:Annoying website features I face as a blind person by JimDabell on Friday September 11, 2020 @06:52AM (#24441275)
I was paying attention to this stuff by the turn of the century and best practice back then was the same as it is now. Screen readers have come a long way, but they could handle empty alt attributes correctly back then as well. I just checked, and the HTML 4 specification has been advising people to use empty alt attributes in this situation since 1997.

https://www.w3.org/TR/WD-html40-970708/struct/includes.html#...

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