It’s rare that a day goes by when somebody asks me a question, either about SEO or Accessibility, which doesn’t in some way require me to answer that “it depends.”

Sometimes, this comes across as a surprise: aren’t there guidelines which are supposed to regulate these things? Yes, there are. And, if people were to ask me “Does doing this comply with Google’s webmaster guidelines?” or “Will this be in compliance with the W3C’s Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, version 1?” then I could generally answer definitely one way or the other.

However, as often as not, this is NOT what people ask. Instead, they ask whether x is a good practice for SEO; whether Google will penalize them for y, or whether z is good accessibility.

It’s not that simple.

Guidelines exist for one reason: to guide. They don’t cover all aspects of the subject and they can’t accommodate all possible situations that come up in the real world. And that’s why following guidelines by rote is simply not a good idea.

Read them. Absorb them. Understand them.

And then forget about them. Spend your time thinking about your users instead. Knowing the simplistic version of accessibility which is conveyed in WCAG 1, take steps to accomodate those rules as best you can: but if a question comes up, the user always wins.

One example which came up recently at Cre8asite Forums has to do with hidden text. Hidden text is a common subject in this area, since it’s a fuzzy subject for SEO: hidden text is frowned upon, but image substitution is a routine practice in web design. So, is it hidden or isn’t it?

No written guideline for either SEO or accessibility actually specifies anything about image replacement. (Keeping in mind that what exists for SEO guidelines are hardly definitive.) Google’s webmaster guidelines are pretty clear on hidden text:

[...]Text (such as excessive keywords) can be hidden in several ways, including:

  • Using white text on a white background
  • Including text behind an image
  • Using CSS to hide text
  • Setting the font size to 0

(Emphasis added.)

“Using CSS to hide text,” taken literally, pretty well condemns image replacement. Regardless of the method used, you are essentially removing text and replacing it. But your question shouldn’t really be “am I using CSS to hide text?” — it should be “What text am I hiding, and why?”

With image replacement, the text you’re hiding is identical to the text you’re replacing with the image. The image simply provides an image-based version of the same text. The content is still available to the user. With spam, the text you’re replacing is, shall we say, not intended to be made available to the user. That is a simple and key difference. The reason for replacing an image is purely aesthetic; the reason for hiding keyword stuffing is purely deceptive.

The guidelines do actually say this; just not in so many words. Literal interpretation is a weak tool. Taking best practice guidelines for any subject holistically, it’s important to constantly be aware of the need to interpret. While what the guidelines do say needs to be taken into account; it’s as important to understand what they don’t say.