area-alt-quality

<area> alt text must be appropriate (manual review)

manualWCAG 1.1.1 (A)confidence: mediumseverity: minorperceivable

Flags <area> elements with non-empty alt text for human review of appropriateness.

Applies to. Applies to <area> elements whose alt attribute is present and non-empty. The <area> must carry a non-empty href (otherwise it is not a hyperlink at all per the HTML spec) and belong to a <map> that an <img usemap> actually references; an <area> in an unused map is out of scope. The referencing <img> must actually be rendered (hidden/display:none/ visibility exclude it; aria-hidden does not, since <area> is not a DOM descendant of <img>), and the <area> itself must be eligible: hidden, display:none and inert on the <area> or its <map> do not exclude it, since neither generates a box and 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. role="presentation"/"none" takes an element out unless it is focusable.

Expectation. Human review is required to confirm that the provided text alternative is accurate and appropriate.

Examples

can't tell

<img src="office-map.png" usemap="#floorplan">
<map name="floorplan">
  <area href="/rooms/12" shape="rect" coords="0,0,40,24" alt="Room 12">
</map>

The area has non-empty alt text in a used image map — worth confirming "Room 12" is accurate for that region.

n/a

<map name="unused">
  <area href="/rooms/12" shape="rect" coords="0,0,40,24" alt="Room 12">
</map>

No `<img usemap>` references this map, so the area is never hit-tested or rendered — out of scope.

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