Many web pages either fail to use the alt attribute for images, or use a blank attribute where it is not appropriate (for example where alternative text is needed to provide link text). The W3C User Agent Accessibility Guidelines 1.0 recognise this common problem, and suggest that user agents should attempt to repair missing alternative text: http://www.w3.org/TR/WAI-USERAGENT/guidelines.html#tech-missing-alt http://www.w3.org/TR/WAI-USERAGENT/guidelines.html#tech-null-alt WebKit/VoiceOver do not attempt to repair alt text, but many user agent/assistive technology pairings on Windows do . A recent example mentioned on the MacVisionaries mailing list was http://www.earflix.com/ , where the homepage has a lot of image links without alt attributes. (Yes, I recognise this is fundamentally an author error and have already reported this issue via the Earflix contact form. But there are lots of other webpages like this.) If WebKit made use of the title attributes and/or parsed useful words out of the image URL to reconstruct alternative text, then VoiceOver users would be able to use the site rather than resorting to using Windows. Especially where it is not possible to repair alt text or where the repair is ineffective), it would good to allow users to label images themselves and even to share labels with each other. Since this might be helpful for applications other than web browsers, it should be carefully considered (probably by Apple) whether labelling should be a WebKit feature, a VoiceOver feature, or both.
<rdar://problem/5456957>
WebKit provides VoiceOver with a lot more information about images now, include the URL. VoiceOver makes use of the URL if there's no other information Also in SnowLeopard VoiceOver allows user labeling of images (http://www.apple.com/macosx/accessibility/) So I consider this bug resolved