[thelist] ALT pop-up

aardvark roselli at earthlink.net
Sat Feb 17 21:25:49 CST 2001


> From: "Aaron Cole" <awcole72 at hotmail.com>
>
> I'd like to know if anyone knows how to prevent the pop-up box from
> appearing when a vistor mouseovers an image with an ALT tag.  I'm all
> for accessibilty, but I've never understood the need for the pop-up
> box.  It's obviously not for the blind.

the browser was never *supposed* to show alt attributes as 
tooltips... MSIE did that as a *feature* (which NN and others 
adopted, unfortunately), which had the unfortunate impact of 
making developers rely on alt attributes for extra content, as 
opposed to entering information useful to users with images turned 
off (or those who can't see them)...  i once went to a site where the 
nav buttons were wonky metaphors, but the alt attribute actually 
told you what the button was in plain english... one of the few sites 
out there unintentionally more suited to the blind...

one way you can override it in IE4+ for windows is to add a blank 
title attribute, since it will give preference to the title attribute over 
the alt attribute... however, this will not affect NN4- or most other 
browsers that incorrectly display alt attributes...

> If preventing the pop-box is not possible, can it's appearance be
> altered using stylesheets?

nope, that's completely up to the browser to determine... by 
default, it generally uses the OS's default method of displaying tool-
tip-type content...




More information about the thelist mailing list