Always on Top Setting
July 17, 2017 12:00 AM
Is it okay to set a decorative image as "Always on Top" - if the image also has an Empty Alt Tag?
Discussion (1)
It is OK in the same sense that beating a dead horse would not damage the horse's health. An image with the "Empty Alt Tag" property is invisible to assistive technologies, that is, irrelevant to accessibility. It has no place in the logical order when published, so its position in the Title Explorer is irrelevant. However, your question prompted me to actually test an example. There is an interesting case where it makes sense to do this. There is a bug in the HTML publishing process where the order in the Title Explorer is converted to tabindex values in the published HTML to specify the tab order. Placing this decorative image as "Always on top" would result in the first tabindex value (tabindex=0) being skipped and the next element assigned a tabindex value of 1. It would function as a placeholder value to ensure tabindex values start at 1. A tabindex of 0 places an element after all elements with a positive tabindex value in the tab order. For a more detailed description, see my post in "Logical Order vs. Tab Order."
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