3 years to fix bad alt text

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.

Terence Eden is on Mastodon

@edent

Hi @PostOffice,
Why is your website's alt text written in Latin? I don't think that is very accessible.
shkspr.mobi/blog/2017/11/n… pic.x.com/9fqyq92p9g

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Post Office

@PostOffice

Replying to @edent@edent Hi Terence, we are looking into this for you. We'll be in touch once we have more info. ~Stacey

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Of 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.

Andy Mabbett

@pigsonthewing

Replying to @PostOffice@PostOffice @edent One year on, it seem that you have not fixed this accessibility issue. The "lorem ipsum" alt attribute is still in the source of, for example, postoffice.co.uk/savings-accoun…

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Post Office

@PostOffice

Replying to @pigsonthewing@pigsonthewing Hi Andy, I am sorry to hear it! I'll pass this on to our Web team. ~Stacey

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I didn't make a big fuss of the 2nd anniversary. But I thought it would be nice to mark its 3rd birthday.

Terence Eden is on Mastodon

@edent

Replying to @PostOffice@PostOffice Please can I have an update to this issue? Thanks.

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Post Office

@PostOffice

Replying to @edent@edent 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

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Which was shortly followed by:

Terence Eden is on Mastodon

@edent

Replying to @PostOffice@PostOffice Please can I have an update to this issue? Thanks.

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Post Office

@PostOffice

Replying to @edent@edent 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

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A 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!