area-alt-present

<area> must have an accessible name

Checks that <area> elements have a non-empty accessible name via alt, aria-label/aria-labelledby, or title.

Applies to. Applies to <area> elements that: 1) are in a <map> that is referenced by an <img usemap>, AND 2) carry a non-empty href (an <area> with no href is not a hyperlink at all per the HTML spec, and has nothing for this rule to name), AND 3) the referencing <img> is actually rendered (hidden/display:none/ visibility exclude it; aria-hidden does not, since <area> is not a DOM descendant of <img>), AND 4) the <area> itself is eligible in the accessibility tree. hidden, display:none and inert on the <area> or its <map> do not exclude it: neither element generates a box, so a real browser's image-map hit-testing ignores all three there (verified against Chromium and Firefox); only those mechanisms on a genuine ancestor of the whole <img>+<map> pairing do.

Expectation. Each applicable <area> element has a non-empty accessible name, from alt, aria-label/aria-labelledby, or title. An <area> in a used map is always a link, so alt="" is not decorative here as it is on <img>: an empty alt fails the same as a missing one unless another mechanism names it.

Examples

<img src="image.png" alt="" usemap="#nav">
<map name="nav">
  <area href="/x" shape="rect" coords="0,0,40,24" alt="Go to green">
</map>

<img src="image.png" alt="" usemap="#nav">
<map name="nav">
  <area href="/x" shape="rect" coords="0,0,40,24">
</map>

Related rules

• area-alt-quality

View source