RE: Thoughts on professional portrait (headshot) images?

The normative text of WCAG SC 1.1.1 says “All non-text content that is presented to the user has a text alternative that serves the equivalent purpose”. An important question is whose purpose?

For instance, when we added headshots to the Management Team page of our website, our intention was that they were purely decorative. Our purpose was not to convey any information at all, and as such the images have null “alt” attributes.

Users may view the images for other purposes, but I cannot know what they are.

My view is that the author’s view should prevail. If the author says the image is decorative, then that’s what it is. If the purpose of the headshots is to convey something visually, the “alt” text should convey it too.

However, I don’t see any requirement to use “alt” text to convey incidental information that is not the purpose of the headshot, such as age, gender, skin or eye colour, hair style (or lack thereof), clothing, distinguishing marks etc. In some cases the purpose of the headshot might be to convey those things, but it usually won’t and it’s the author’s decision if it is.

Steve Green
Managing Director
Test Partners Ltd


From: Guy Hickling <guy.hickling@gmail.com>
Sent: 22 August 2022 00:44
To: WAI Interest Group discussion list <w3c-wai-ig@w3.org>
Subject: Re: Thoughts on professional portrait (headshot) images?

To answer the question of whether headshot images should have an alt text, go back to first principles. First ask the question, "Does this image give any information to sighted people?"

The answer is yes, of course it does - headshot images give all kinds of useful information to sighted people. (Whether everyone wants that information is not relevant - some sighted users will be interested in the information.) Therefore you must give it an alt text for blind people, as required by WCAG 1.1.1.

To do otherwise is to deny blind people the right to even know that an image of the person is present. The fact that it is difficult to decide what information should be given in the alt text is not a reason for not giving anything at all!