I was reading the NYTimes today, and ran across the following editorial. The point of the article is to show some of the statistics involving intolerance and child suicide. Unfortunately, all of the interesting data tables were presented as graphics and none had alternative text provided.
<img src="http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/blogs/blow/aug/bully3.jpg" alt="INSERT DESCRIPTION">
One table containing multiple columns, rows, and descriptive text, had the following HTML code:
<img src="http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/blogs/blow/aug/bully3.jpg" alt="INSERT DESCRIPTION">
Whatever tool the author was using was smart enough to that alt text needed to be included for this image, but the author may have remained unaware.
For 15 years, the lack of alt text has been a problem for web accessibility, and we haven't figured out a solution. The original WebInSight project could offer a solution by OCR'ing this text, but a lot of the structure would be lost.
What needs to be done to prevent another decade from passing in which we still haven't solved the most basic and easiest to understand accessibility issue?
