Just recalled that I posted this question at the old BBS right before it broke down. Actually, I suspect this was the reason it broke down.

OK, here goes. WCAG requires alternate content for all OBJECTs. What if their purpose is purely decorative? What if I use repeated OBJECTs? With images I'd use an empty alt in the first case. In the second case I would use an alt text for one image and leave alt blank for the rest of them.

Why would users of screen readers and so on want unnecessary noise just because I use OBJECT and not IMG? I don't know how for example JAWS handles an empty OBJECT. I have it, but the configuration options are so complex there is no way to know what a real user may configure it to do.

Anyone clued in on this?

Found the following weirdness at http://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG10-CORE-TECHS/#text-equivalent

Text equivalents must be provided for logos, photos, submit buttons, applets, bullets in lists, ASCII art, and all of the links within an image map as well as invisible images used to lay out a page.

So what's the proper text equivalent of a spacer GIF? Should one use alt="margin" or perhaps alt="---------------------"? OTOH, http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/struct/objects.html#adef-alt says

Do not specify irrelevant alternate text when including images intended to format a page, for instance, alt="red ball" would be inappropriate for an image that adds a red ball for decorating a heading or paragraph. In such cases, the alternate text should be the empty string ("").

Apparently there's a conflict here. One way to solve it (W3C-theologically speaking) might be to use an image as alternative content, then give that image empty ALT text: <object ...><img ... alt=""></object>.

I don't see anything at http://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG10-CORE-TECHS/#text-equivalent to indicate that alt="" isn't an acceptable text equivalent. I would use alt="" if I ever had the misfortune of using a spacer GIF.

Right, that's what I want to duplicate for OBJECT but I don't know how to do that.

Using <img> within the "object" element would be good for accommodating old browsers. If that's not a consideration, then empty content for the "object" element makes sense to me.

Yes, the point is that it's just fluff and a static image isn't meaningful. I'd go for the empty element too, but do you know how JAWS et al handle an empty OBJECT? I mean, if they start to scream "Object, object, object!" it's kinda uncool.

I don't know how JAWS handles an empty OBJECT.

According to http://weblogs.macromedia.com/accessibilit...search_of_a.cfm JAWS does support at least Flash embedded by OBJECT, but: