Why Wikipedia does not have alt text in the logo area?
When I use Wikipedia from a mobile device, I use a opera mini with traffic compression and disabled images. I'm used/ assuming to use the full version of the site (not mobile view). And the logo of the site in the upper left corner is displayed by the colored area. First, to make a tap on a poorly understood colored area is not cool. Secondly, this is an active element - a link to the main page, can there be at least some alt text "Wikipedia"? Or is it unimportant because below there is a link "Main page" (although it is more small and click on the logo is the common action)? Can there be a sublevel (zoom) span with text as on the w3org site?
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As far as I know, there is no configuration variable and site requests cannot set it therefore.
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Not a WCAG 2.0 violation in my opinion, on the basis that the logo is pure decoration. It is deliberately hidden from screen readers.
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@tstarling Where does “deliberately hidden” come from? https://www.powermapper.com/tests/screen-readers/labelling/a-title-img-no-alt/ tells a different story about link+title attribute combinations.
There's a patch by myself related to this, we might reconsider and add an aria-hidden=true valued attribute.
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When Gabriel Wicke introduced the Monobook skin in 2004, I asked him why the logo was a div with a background image, instead of an img tag. He said that he did it that way to hide it from screen readers. For the same reason, he placed the content near the start of the HTML, with sidebar, tabs and personal links afterwards, visually reordered with CSS, and he added "jump to" links, hidden to regular browsers, to jump to the sidebar. Most of those optimisations have been lost (or perhaps superseded by screen reader changes). The logo div remained in Vector but was replaced by an img tag in vector-2022.
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Although, come to think of it, it's a somewhat implausible story, since you would think <img alt=""> would do the job well enough. It's possible the logo div was a hack for some other non-CSS client and I'm confusing it with Monobook's screen reader hacks.
But I still think that announcing "Wikipedia The Free Encyclopedia" when the logo is encountered, redundantly with #siteSub which contains the exact same text, would degrade the screen reader experience. People only need to hear the tagline once.