WCAG 2.0 success criterion 1.1.1 compliance: using accessibility checkers to find empty alt attributes in university home-pages

With 285-million blind and visually impaired worldwide, and 25.5 million in the United States, federally funded universities should be at the forefront when designing accessible websites for the blind community. Fifty percent of the university homepages discussed in my thesis failed accessibility checker tests because alternative text was not provided in the alt-attribute for numerous images, making them inaccessible to blind users. The images which failed included logos, photographs of people, and images with text. Understanding image content and context in relation to the webpage is important for writing alternative text that is useful, yet writers interpret and define the content and context of images differently or not at all. Not all universities follow legal guidelines of using alternative text for online images nor implements best practices of analyzing images prior to describing them within the context of the webpage. When an image used in a webpage is designed only to be seen by sighted users and not to be seen by screen reader software, then that image is not comparably accessible to a blind user, as Section 508 mandates.