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beaudoind
Participant
February 25, 2020
Question

Accessibility: Images marked as "Decorative Images" still demanding alt text

  • February 25, 2020
  • 1 reply
  • 4839 views

Hello, I work on a lot of accessibility projects including remediating PDFs that need to meed ADA compliance.  When I go through and add alternative text to images, several of them do not require alt text, as they are purely decorative images. Naturally I check the "decorative image" box which marks them as a background artifact.

 

However, these same images pop back up in the accessibility checker which demands they still be given alt text. Why?

1 reply

A
andrea12023
Participant
July 15, 2022

Having the same issue, has anyone found a fix for this?

B
beaudoindAuthor
Participant
July 15, 2022

With enough time and experience, I think I've answered my own question. Typically this problem resides in the tag structure. Open you tab panel and locate where the image tag is in the hierarchy tree. Pay attention to the type of tag that is being used and if there is more thatn one item inside the tag or not.

If the tag is labelled as an "artifact" it should not be requiring alt text. (This is for decorative images)

If the tag is labelled as a "figure" it will require artifact.

If the tag is artifact but it is still seems to want alt text, check to make sure it is not accidentally nested inside a figure tag. If so move it outside of the image tag. In almost all cases, check the tagging structure. When image (figure) tags are on their own and not nested inside another tag, the seem to work better as expected. I hope this help a little. Let me know if you have more questions.

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