Very tedious accessibility question about alt tags

Question

For a WCAG 2.0 compliant website need to have alt tags for the images.

When it comes to something like a company logo. Should the alt tag just be the name of the company, or the name of the company followed by "Logo" I think the former makes more sense but if there is a definitive best practice I would like to know!

Exciting question eh?

Answer 1

The best guideline is, if the image wasn't available - what would you want to see instead?

The alt text shouldn't be a description of the image, it's a textual alternative to the image.

Answer 2

Is the logo of value to users of screen-readers? If not--then consider displaying the image via CSS rather than an <img> tag--CSS (presentational) images do not need to have alt tags (they actually can't have them), they are understood to be a visual-portion of the page rather than the actual content of the page.

implies that the image is valuable content related to the page--so if the logo is essentially eye-candy, of presentational value only, then it may not belong in HTML at all.

Just remember: screen-readers allow users to access the content. HTML is for content, CSS for presentation--if your HTML is muddied with non-content then providing a good, accessible, experience becomes much more difficult.