ASCII art used for text alternative Accessibility Checkpoint

Description

img alt text must not use ASCII art (which includes smileys).

Help

Change the alt text to a meaningful description. alt text consisting of punctuation characters sounds like “colon dash right-bracket” when read aloud.

Applicable standards

• WCAG 2.0 F72 (Success Criteria: 1.1.1 level A)
• WCAG 2.1 F72 (Success Criteria: 1.1.1 level A)
• WCAG 2.2 F72 (Success Criteria: 1.1.1 level A)
• Section 508 (2017) F72 (Success Criteria: 1.1.1 level A)

Note: Section 508 Refresh (2017) checkpoints are equivalent to WCAG 2.0 level A and level AA checkpoints.

Impact on users

• NVDA 2024.4 / Chrome 131
• NVDA 2024.4 / Edge 131
• JAWS 2024.2409.2 / Edge 131 Meaningless punctuation read.
• VoiceOver macOS 14.6 / Safari 17.6
• VoiceOver iOS 17.7 / Safari iOS 17.7

Change history

• 5.39 Nov 2020 Improved detection.
• 5.27 Oct 2017 Fixed false positives and negatives. Changed rule ID from AccWcag1-1.1.14 to AccHtmlImgAltAsciiArt.
• 5.9 Jun 2015 Detect non-standard image tag.
• 3.5 Dec 2009 Don’t fire for non-Latin characters and images of punctuation characters (e.g. a big question mark graphic).
• 3.0 Dec 2008 Now triggers WCAG2 issue.
• 2.0 Dec 2007 Now triggers Section 508 issue.
• 1.0 Feb 2007 Added.

This page describes a web site issue detected in HTML documents by SortSite Desktop and OnDemand Suite.

Rule ID: AccHtmlImgAltAsciiArt