Google sometimes modifies its homepage logo to celebrate a holiday or the birthday of someone famous.

Today they are commemorating the birth of Percival Lowell with a logo of Mars.

Now my concern is the text they are using in the ALT tag. They have "Percival Lowell" in the ALT tag with the site linking to Google Mars (http://google.com/mars/) , a site hooked up to Google maps allowing users to move around the planet.

According to Google’s own webmaster guidelines, ALT tags should be "descriptive and accurate".

I also think it is very inconsiderate to people who are blind, colour blind or low-sighted who rely on ALT tags to provide them with a description of the image. For more information, please see the W3C ALT tags section ( http://www.w3.org/QA/Tips/altAttribute).

Does anyone else find this a bit hypocritical or am I just being a bit picky?

I would love to hear what Matt Cutts has to say about this.

I'm not sure this is spam. Gosh. If a debatable choice of alt attribute - debatably along the lines of "could be better" is spammy now then we're all in trouble!

A good guide is Google's Spam Report (http://www.google.com/contact/spamreport.html) page. If you can fill in the form there then that's a good start.

No it isn't spam. It's 100% relevant and honoring his work:

http://www.nasm.si.edu/ceps/etp/mars/percival.html

Percival Lowell (1855-1916) is one of the best known observers of the planet Mars. Lowell is pictured here in the observer's chair of the 61-centimeter (24-inch) refracting telescope in the observatory he established in Flagstaff, Arizona. Lowell Observatory is still one of the foremost sites for telescopic studies of Mars and the other planets.

Agreed Marcia!

Google usually uses the alt tag to describe what they are celebrating/honoring. In this case it couldn't be more relevant, and it's definitly an interesting thing to open. Personally, I think Percival Lowell would have been delighted.

Definitely not spam to me. Spam is the excessive use of a term. You may say it's not totally descriptive to the logo but the Google logo has been customised to honor Mr Lovell so that the alt text makes sense.

If Google reverted back to its original logo and the alt text remains, then that's a red flag to me.

You have a point on accessibility issue, that people with sight impaired (chosing to display text instead of graphic) will come across a wrongly referenced image.

By the way, that's alt attribute and not alt tag.