You don’t need to have a non-null value for the “alt” attribute of every element, but you DO need to have an “alt” attribute for every element. If the element has no informational meaning, then the correct value is “”. ex. . Not having the “alt” attribute will cause validation to fail. I had checked change.gov for accessibility shortly after it launched, and saw this error repeated a number of times.

Out of perverse curiosity, I just went through the homepage and identified the validation errors. If these few are fixed, it will validate as XHTML transitional. I think it would then pass any accessibility audit, even one conducted by a human and not by Cynthia Says.

No CDATA wrapper for script content, so reserved characters fail validation (you found this)
Uses the ID value “moduleOpenGovernment” twice — must be unique
One unclosed element
Unquoted attribute values on one element that uses image map (you found this)
Missing “alt” attribute on one element that uses image map

The problems are probably the result of output from Fireworks or something. Just judging from the homepage, the site has been significantly cleaned up since its initial launch.

All that said, change.gov is much, much better in these regards than many sites I’ve been responsible for. But then it has to be — digital media cuts both ways and no president has going to be as closely scrutinized as Obama will be.

1. Getting a site to validate with Cynthia Says does not really give you accessibility compliance. It just says you validated with Cynthia Says. The unfortunate truth of accessibility is that much of this stuff requires qualitative, not quantitative, assessment.

2. You don’t have to have ALT text for EVERY image, although in the case they appear to be using, it probably should have it.

3. Change.gov is failing XHTML 1.0 compliance because of the img tag without quotes around its attributes and because their jQuery script is using a less-than symbol that’s not escaped. On the former, looks like a new coder who doesn’t know what he/she is doing. On the latter, they really should move the jQuery into a separate, cached JavaScript file. It’ll fractionally help download times, too.

4. Honestly, the Obama stuff has been remarkably better in terms of accessibility than McCain’s mess was. And they’ve been responsive — after the web community dogged them for not captioning Obama’s first weekly address on YouTube, they started capitoning them… starting with week two.