Converting all the IMG tags without alt text to say alt="text" disregards the spirit of the 508 (accessibility) guidelines and is kind of offensive to the visually-impaired audience they are designed to help.

Why? Hearing the screen reading software say "text" to describe every image they can't actually see isn't likely to make a user real glad you're "508 compliant".

Any meaningful fix would need somebody 'editorial' to enter descriptive text for each different image in turn (clearly a manual task rather than a coding job).

Appreciate you're probably just trying to code what you've been asked to, but you might want to do the decent thing and point out to your federal agency that this is really not helpful. You never know, if they agree then the task will be off your desk!

---

---

Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!

Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.

Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.

Please read these before you post! —

• How do I compose an effective node title?
• How do I post a question effectively?
• Markup in the Monastery

Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:

a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr

You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)

	For:		Use:
	&		&
	<		&lt;
	>		&gt;
	[		&#91;
	]		&#93;

Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?

See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.