| Abstract |
This pilot study assesses the extent to which online newspapers in the United States convey the iconic information of their news photos through words in the form of alternative text, or ALT text. Without ALT text, news photos may be "invisible" to the online newspaper readership that is blind or that has chosen to turn off image loading on their Web browsers. In effect, online newspapers that do not provide equivalent textual content for news photos are distributing an incomplete product.
The researcher defines nine types of ALT text in this study. The definitions cover a range of specificity from "descriptive," which conveys the composition of the photo, and "utility," which relates the meaning of the news photo, to "none."
Content analysis revealed that no news photo was supported by either a "descriptive" or a "utility" ALT tag. A key finding of this study is that 64 percent of the news photos coded had no ALT text at all.
This means visual content may be lost to readers who cannot, or who choose not to see images online.
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