W3C home Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) home

WAI: Strategies, guidelines, resources to make the Web accessible to people with disabilities

[DRAFT] Groups of images

A grouped collection of images is often used to convey a single piece of information, for instance star images to denote a product rating. In this case, the text alternative for one of the images should convey the information conveyed by the entire group, all other images should have null or empty alt attributes. For example the descriptive text alternative on one image should be "4 out of 5 stars", rather than "1 star" or Half star" on each image.

Example 1: Group of images for rating

This group of five images shows a product rating. There are five images, three filled stars, one half filled star and one empty star, indicating the overall rating. The text alternative for the first image is "Rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars", all other images have a null or empty alt attribute (alt="").

Rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars

Code snippet

<img src="../img/star1.jpg" alt="Rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars">
<img src="../img/star1.jpg" alt="">
...