Terence Eden. He has a beard and is smiling.
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Noli scribere Latine imaginem describere

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When I'm bored, I like to search websites for the "Lorem Ipsum" placeholder text. It's a quick way to find discarded pages and test content.

I was particularly confused that the UK's Post Office had a dozen pages containing that little Latin phrase.

Screenshot of the Post Office website showing lots of seemingly unrelated pages

A quick dive into one of the pages, found this enlightening snippet of code:

HTML code. The alt text of the image is in Latin

This is a monumentally inconsiderate thing to do. I can guess exactly why it happened - a developer got a warning from an HTML validator that alt-text was required. Rather than putting in a description which would be useful for visually impaired people (and SEO), they just shoved some placeholder text in.

If you run a website - please create useful alt text.

1 year anniversary update! This still isn't fixed.

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5 thoughts on “Noli scribere Latine imaginem describere”

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  1. Back in 2017, I noticed that the UK Post Office was doing very dodgy things with their alt text.Lots of their pages had this snippet of code:Rather than add properly accessible alt text, a developer added placeholder Latin text.Being a good webizen, I tried to report this.

    Hi Terence, we are looking into this for you. We'll be in touch once we have more info. ~Stacey— Post Office (@PostOffice) November 13, 2017

    https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.jsOf course, Twitter is where good customer service goes to die. So, it wasn’t much of a surprise when it wasn’t fixed a year later.

    Hi Andy, I am sorry to hear it! I'll pass this on to our Web team. ~Stacey— Post Office (@PostOffice) November 7, 2018

    https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.jsI didn’t make a big fuss of the 2nd anniversary. But I thought it would be nice to mark its 3rd birthday.

    Hi, we have a team looking into this currently now Terence as we are concerned that you have reported this previously and it is still ongoing. I'll see if I can get you an update and thanks for your patience – Ryan— Post Office (@PostOffice) November 25, 2020

    https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.jsWhich was shortly followed by:

    From the conversations I have been CC;d into it is looking like there is a fix for this and it is being implemented next week. Thank you for drawing this to our attention again and apologies it has taken so long – Ryan— Post Office (@PostOffice) November 25, 2020

    https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.jsA quick check and it has finally been fixed!It is annoying that there’s no real way to get companies to fix their broken stuff. If you report it to customer services – you’ll likely be ignored. It makes me wish that there were public bug trackers for everything!

What links here from around this blog?

  1. HTML code. The alt text of the image is in Latin3 years to fix bad alt text

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