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I run a site that was recently indexed by Google (a few days ago). The main page has a few small images separating paragraphs of text. When I search Google for the site, it happens to show the parts of the paragraphs with the images, in the search snippet, which would be fine except it displays the alt text of the images, which looks bad.
Is there a way to stop this from happening, besides removing the alt text or toying with the images' placement?
As far as I know, there is no way to prevent this. But looking at your problem with a more technical perspective, you could off course:
simply remove the alt text or use a better alt text
remove the images from the DOM and instead put a placeholder element instead of it like:
<div class="img-holder" data-src="/img/example.jpg"></div>
With javascript you could find all instances of .img-holder and replace them with an inline image with the given source (and alt-text when you also store that as data attribute).
You cannot prevent search engines, or other user agents, from doing whatever they like with attributes in your markup. You can add attributes, or change their values, in client-side scripting, and then the odds are that search engines do not see such additions or changes (since they normally do not run client-side script code).
If the images are just decorative separators between paragraphs, then you should simply use alt="", avoiding this problem (and other problems too).
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So I am now learning html, and I was just wondering why tags such as cite even exist. When I open a website as a user, I still see the text as italic when the code is written as cite.
I found that the tags are useful when it comes to screen readers, so basically for users that have problems with their vision.
Are there any more reasons for these tags? Thank you so much in advance!
Tags are small snippets of HTML coding that tell engines how to properly “read” your content. In fact, you can vastly improve search engine visibility by adding SEO tags in HTML.
When a search engine’s crawler comes across your content, it takes a look at the HTML tags of the site. This information helps engines like Google determine what your content is about and how to categorize the material.
Some of them also improve how visitors view your content in those search engines. And this is in addition to how social media uses content tags to show your articles.
In the end, it’s HTML tags for SEO that will affect how your website performs on the Internet. Without these tags, you’re far less likely to really connect with an audience.
About cite tag: The tag defines the title of a creative work (e.g. a book, a poem, a song, a movie, a painting, a sculpture, etc.). Note: A person's name is not the title of a work. The text in the element usually renders in italic.
Regarding the cite tag, according to MDN:
The HTML element is used to describe a reference to a cited
creative work, and must include the title of that work. The reference
may be in an abbreviated form according to context-appropriate
conventions related to citation metadata.
This enables you to manage all the css applied to quotes easily, were that to be your use case (if you happened to have a lot of quotes on a site). The italics you have observed are part of that css, or rather the default css applied by the browser.
In the broader spectrum
Oftentimes you will run into tags that as of today are not in use anymore. There's different industry standards for different time periods.
All of the tags exist, because there was a reason for web browsers to have a specific way of reading a piece of content.
For example centering a div used to be an almost legendary task that was achievable using multiple methods, all of which had different advantages and disadvantages. However, nowdays it's customary to use the flexbox.
Bottom line is its a way for web browsers and search engines to read and interpret the content you're providing
Tags such as and are used for text decoration nothing else you can also change text fonts and styles by using CSS.
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I'm curious whether the CSS visually-hidden technique, most commonly used on font icons, for alternative image text is preferable to using the alt attribute. The argument against the alt attribute being that a screen reader announces "Graphic" any time it sees and <img> which is less natural. For example:
<p>ABC <img src="right-arrow.png" src="converts to"> XYZ</p>
Reads as "ABC graphic converts to XYZ"
<p>
ABC
<span class="visually-hidden">converts to</span>
<img src="right-arrow.png" src="" aria-hidden="true">
XYZ
</p>
Reads as "ABC converts to XYZ"
I can agree it's less natural when screen reader reads "Graphic" every time we focus on some image. From the other hand, straightforward explanation of type of content may be extremely important for people with impairments. Navigating through site is hard enough, so if we can narrow the field of interpretation, it's advised to do it.
What I mean is surfing the Internet with screen reader is not a perfect experience. But for the moment we have to stick to it and by making some things more schematic, we actually make it a little more clearer.
Also we can look to WCAG docs about this issue where there's a few advised techniques to choose from.
Situation A: If a short description can serve the same purpose and present the same information as the non-text content:
G94: Providing short text alternative for non-text content that serves the same purpose and presents the same information as the non-text content using one of the following techniques:
Short text alternative techniques for Situation A:
ARIA6: Using aria-label to provide labels for objects
ARIA10: Using aria-labelledby to provide a text alternative for non-text content
G196: Using a text alternative on one item within a group of images that describes all items in the group
H2: Combining adjacent image and text links for the same resource
H35: Providing text alternatives on applet elements
H37: Using alt attributes on img elements
H53: Using the body of the object element
H86: Providing text alternatives for ASCII art, emoticons, and leetspeak
So basically we could choose also from aria-attributes (and we can sometimes, but only if alt is not enough) BUT there is also one more strong argument for using alt attributes - SEO
Using alt text on your images can make for a better user experience, but it may also help earn you both explicit and implicit SEO benefits. Along with implementing image title and file naming best practices, including alt text may also contribute to image SEO.
While search engine image recognition technology has vastly improved over the years, search crawlers still can't "see" the images on a website page like we can, so it's not wise to leave the interpretation solely in their hands. If they don't understand, or get it wrong, it's possible you could either rank for unintended keywords or miss out on ranking altogether.
quote from here
Both techniques are counterproductive and useless.
In your example :
ABC → XYZ
This means nothing to me. I'm not blind, I have no screenreader. And I still don't understand what is this curious arrow.
Of course having an img tag (with an alt) may help me to understand the meaning of this arrow by hovering with a mouse. But, how can I guess that this arrow is in fact an img tag and that I have to hover with my mouse? How can I do without using a mouse?
Let's try another method :
ABC converts to XYZ
We don't use img tag, we don't use visually hidden text. Everybody with or without screenreader will understand.
There are a lot more people targeted by accessibility than blind people and you should always try to satisfy everybody.
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The website I'm making is for an author/illustrator and she wants words in the navigation bar to be written in her own handwriting, so the links in the navigation bar and her own name, which serves as the title, are all in the form of pictures rather than text.
Similarly, the homepage consists of some of her illustrations, each accompanied by a handwritten link, so that there is no text at all. I'm starting to realise from reading online that this may be seen as 'bad practise', so I want to ask those with more experience than me: how problematic is the lack of text?
I am not too worried about loading times and such - I've managed to make the image files quite small - but more things concerning accessibility and whether the site will appear in search engines.
And are there any ways I can avoid problems whilst still using the handwriting?
When you want to use images as navigation elements and are concerned about SEO and accessibility, you can use the alt-tag which you should use anyways.
Example:
<img src='images/nav1.png' alt='Home' />
Screenreaders and search engines use these tags to deal with images which they of course can not read.
There are two issues here. First, people who do not see images (for one reason or another) will find the site almost impossible to navigate, unless the img elements have alt attributes. Correctly written alt attributes resolve this problem and can be expected to provide adequate information to search engines as well. Second, people who use normal graphic browsers will see the texts in a specific appearance. This may mean that they find it less legible than normal text, perhaps even illegible. This greatly depends on the style of the text, including size and the contrast between text and background color.
If a downloadable font were used instead, via #font-face, then the latter problem would in principle be less severe, since users could disable page fonts and see the text in their preferred font. This is rather theoretical, though, and creating a font is nontrivial and probably not worth the effort here.
On the practical side, write the alt attributes and ask the author consider whether the font is legible enough to all visitors, including people with eyesight problems. It’s up to the author to decide whether the reduction in usability and accessibility is justified by the artistic impression made.
You can choose from many handwritting fonts and link them via #font-face.
If she wants to use her 'font', use images (ideally one image - looking for sprite) and put text underneath - it's call image replacement.
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I'm working on a script that is programmatically formatting web content. Because the content is generated in a WYSIWYG editor that I have no control over, all new lines of text are exported as <div>s.
My very first gut reaction is DON'T DO THAT! But why? There's nothing exceptional about the <p> tag. I am concerned about any potential problem. I'd rather not waste the effort selectively adding <p>s in code if I don't have to.
This got me thinking...
SEO: Will google hate me for it?
Accessibility: Will screen readers die on this text or ignore it maybe?
Fancy: Will double-tap to zoom break on mobile devices?
Similar but different: Using custom HTML Tags
INB4 somebody complains about IE.
p tags do actually behave radically different than div tags, which is sadly beyond your control since this has to do with DOM parsing rather than CSS. Thankfully, you will most likely run into less problems with div tags than the former.
Even though p tags are block elements, they are defined to only be allowed to contain phrasing content. In reality, this means that they can only contain elements whose default display type is inline. Browsers will thus literally refuse to render e.g. div tags inside a p tag no matter what CSS you apply. div tags, however obviously don't have this restriction.
The only thing that I know of that differs to the favour of p tags, is that they don't require a closing tag if directly followed by one of a select few different tags (e.g. other p tags)
Other than that, there are no drawbacks in using div tags that I know of, and you are free to use whatever you want.
div tags will still let search engines index your text. Custom tags can be dangerous (especially on older browsers), but divs are widely supported. While there are some potential semantic differences, I doubt you would run into issues.
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Okay, so I know that this is really frowned upon, and this is something that I don't typically do. In fact, I've never launched a website like this one. But there doesn't seem to be much of an alternative.
I am working with a web design with a client that is essentially just a full-page slider. The original design looks like it could've been ported to Flash. I plan on using jQuery so at least it isn't plugin-dependent, but the content text is intricately designed and incorporated into the slide images.
From what I'm seeing, the only text that I can actually place onto the page without embedding in an image is the navigation and maybe part of the site header.
There is a lot of content in the slide images -- too much for putting in an alt="" attribute on the <img /> tag. I know that the longdesc="" attribute is deprecated from HTML5 and isn't really supported well anyway, so that's out. I thought of duplicating the text from the image and placing it in a hidden <div></div> tag, or in a <noscript></noscript> tag, or offsetting it so it's invisible, and other methods of hiding content for dynamic, JavaScript-based sites. However, I am also aware that search engine developers like Google frown on that sort of thing and it might harm my SEO rankings.
The <noscript></noscript> element would be a good solution, but from my understanding you can only implement it legitimately if the content of the element duplicates content that exists elsewhere in the document and is dynamically controlled. Maybe I misinterpreted that?
Are there any other solutions you can think of?
object element
You could use object instead of img. The content of the object element will be used as fallback (resp. as alternative for screen reader users or search engine bots):
<object data="your-image.png" type="image/png">
<!-- the alternative/fallback content -->
</object>
longdesc attribute
Or you could use the longdesc attribute for the img element, which is defined in a separate specificiation: http://www.w3.org/TR/html-longdesc/ (Working Draft):
This specification defines a longdesc attribute to link extended descriptions with images in HTML5-based content.
meta-description
In addition you could include the text (or the beginning resp. a summary of it) in the description-meta element:
<meta name="description" content"…">
But this would only work if you have separate URLs for each image (which could be accomplished with the History API)
You should create a place-holder div, that contains the text-based content. Than create a JavaScript function (onload) to replace the innerHTML property of the place-holder with the image!