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With accessibility being more and more important these days, particularly for organizations that are required to be Section 508 compliant, there’s been a lot of discussion of “How accessible is too accessible?” This generally involves questions of how much instruction to include, whether to use accesskeys, and to what extent it’s important that a site look good when text size is increased, at the cost of how it looks when the text size is normal.

But one area that’s rarely discussed is when and when not to use Alt tags, particularly in email. Alt tags, the captions that appears when the image does not, or when hovering over an image, are particularly handy for describing to screen readers what the included images are. They can also improve site search engine optimization and act as a place to put copyright info.

But they can wreck havoc on emails, when messages like this arrive in your inbox:

More below the fold on why Alt tags like this are unnecessary and why it’s important to consider your teaser when writing an email.

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Each year, the Key School in Arlington has a Halloween Parade in our neighborhood. And again this year, Beaconfire staff put on our Halloween finest and handed candy out to the adorable costumed kids. See our in-house fairy, phantom, ironman, and more on our Beaconfire Flickr page. Enjoy, and keep your eyes on the Flickr feed for additional photos in the future!