[thelist] Accessibility Question

[Fernando Gómez]

From: "Aaron Cole" <awcole72 at hotmail.com>
Sent: Wednesday, October 02, 2002 6:52 PM

> I'm looking to find an alternative way to present the information found on
> an image.  It's an organizational chart; I'm thinking the alt tag wasn't
> meant to convey that much information.  The chart is on this page:
>
> http://chandler.stanford.edu/mcp/about/
>
> What's the solution here?
>

Hi Aaron,

You are using an image for presenting what is essentially _textual_
information, a practice that is usually discouraged in the context of web
design. Perhaps using a table you could achieve a similar visual display...

Some of the obvious disadvantages of using an image to present text, like in
this case, is that the text cannot be selected and copied, and its size
cannot be altered when a user changes the font size for the page.

Now I have a question: if the longdesc attribute is used, as Austin recently
suggested, will the textual information be indexed by search engines? In
other words, will I ever get this page if I do a search for "Kathy Davis"?

Regards,

Fernando Gomez