Image ALT Text Problems

[sconzachocolates]

Hello… we are working to fix ADA/WCAG compliance issues within sconza.com which uses the PRO theme.

The PRO theme is overriding the standard WordPress media library ALT text which has been entered for every image in the media library, with the word, “image”.

This is shockingly bad for a few good reasons:

• The PRO theme is overriding the default WordPress behavior, which is to store the ALT text in the media library. This means that if anyone ever wants to change to a different theme, they will lose ALL of their ALT text and corresponding SEO value.
• The word “image” added by DEFAULT as the ALT text for every single image on the site unless we add ALT text into the page builder… which is just bad for WCAG compliance and for any users who use a screen reader. Why would it even default to this, that is just nuts.

If you look at how the Avada Fusion Builder handles this… they also have an ALT text field within their page builder, but it works much better than this one, because they are ONLY overriding the ALT text from the Media Library, WHEN some ALT text has been entered into the page builder. Which seems to make good sense. Why can’t we have this on the PRO theme?

So for now, we need to either stop using the PRO theme, or we need to modify the parent theme code to prevent it from ruining the ALT text, or we need a workaround or a fix from you.

Please help us to help you to fix this glaring WCAG problem in your theme or provide a workaround.

Thank you!

[christopher]

Hi Karen,

Thank you for your feedback. There is no alternative feature or workaround at the moment that we could give you, unfortunately.

The matter of fact is that if you created a page using the Pro Page Builder and the Image element, then it is the only time that you have the ALt tag added and you can change that from the Image Element options. For more information:

Image | Themeco Docs

The scenario that you said, which is changing the theme will never happen because if you change the theme, the page that you used our Page Builder will not work anymore as it uses our page builder. You will see no image anymore and just bunch of code.

Thank you.

[sconzachocolates]

Thanks for the reply Christopher.

The scenario of changing themes is if we decide to stop using the Pro theme, and do a redesign on a new theme.

Normally when doing a redesign like this, you wouldn’t be forced to re-enter all your image ALT text, because that data lives within the Media Library and not the theme. I can’t ever imagine recommending this theme or using it in the future due to this issue.

It would be great if you could adopt the Avada way of handling the ALT text within the page builder, but it doesn’t sound like you guys see this as a real problem that needs to be fixed.

[jade]

Hi Karen,

Autofilling the alt tag attribute was not added to the image element because if we pulled the alt tag through by default, that would result in potentially dozens and dozens of DB calls to check for the existence of an alt tag in the WP media manager, which could lead to performance issues on even moderate page sizes. While we can see this being useful for a blog post with a few images, on a hand-built page with tons of images, it gives us concern for doing this automatically.

Rather than requiring users to painstakingly enter in an alt tag entry for every image uploaded to the WP media manager, you can simply add it to the images they ultimately use in the builder (and easily update inline with all other content in the builder, rather than have to go to an external source to update one piece of information).

However, we certainly appreciate the feedback and this is something we can consider in the future development.

Thank you!