bedlam - 5:55 am on Feb 18, 2006 (gmt 0)

Please note the distinction between decorative and functional images.

This leads me to suggest something I haven't seen mentioned in any of the recent accessibility threads: remove decorative images.

"But wait!" I hear from the audience, "those images are part of the corporate identity, crucial to our all-important branding, part of the site's design."

Well then, what the heck are they doing in the markup?! Write this down on a postit and stick it to your monitor:

If the image isn't about the content and the content isn't about the image, then the image shouldn't be there!

There is another option that the use of the word "design" should have caused you to think of--and really, this has been a realistic if not universally available option since the release of IE5, lo those many years ago--that alternative option is CSS [w3.org].

Most if not all of this decorative cruft that you find in the markup (i.e. in the html code) of web pages can be removed--at the design stage--to external stylesheets. This includes rounded corners, list-item bullets, logos and graphical headlines (via fir [google.com]) and non-content images such as the ever popular 'happy suit person,' 'fluffy corporate cloud' and 'girl with headset' genres.

Removing these images to stylesheets has a couple of obvious advantages:

• you don't even have to worry about alt attributes for them,
  
• with every non-content image that you remove, your html document will look more and more like what it fundamentally is--a text document--to people accessing it with screenreaders or other non-graphical useragents
  
• your pages will immediately print better
  
• significant modifications (and in some cases [csszengarden.com] complete redesigns) to page and site designs can be made by editing one file