[thelist] Accessibility Question

martin.p.burns at uk.pwcglobal.com martin.p.burns at uk.pwcglobal.com
Fri May 31 10:20:01 CDT 2002


Memo from Martin P Burns of PricewaterhouseCoopers

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Rob

Having alt text appear in a tooltip is an additional behaviour to the spec
which MS implemented for some ie versions.

fwiw, if the image is a link, ie5/mac displays the title tag of the link,
not the alt tag of the image. Having the 2 as separate elements makes
sense, as one described the image, and one the destination of the link. So
your suggestion of using the title text makes sense.

I'm not sure that your example is an alternative to the image, unless the
image *really* contains all that text. However, if you really do have a
long description, then the longdesc attribute is what you want:
http://www.w3.org/TR/1999/REC-html401-19991224/struct/objects.html#adef-longdesc-IMG

As some UAs don't support longdesc, current practise tends to have a wee
letter 'd' next to the image, linked to the long description page.
http://www.cast.org/Bobby/html/gls/g13.html

Cheers
Martin



[ Picked text/plain from multipart/alternative ]

>Quick question on etiquette for alt text.

And on that topic...

What should be the maxlength of the alt text? In lieu of that, the timing
on
the alt text shows up for only about 5 seconds. Any way to alter that or
iis
that a M$ thing?

Try reading this in an alt text:
Announcements - An official communication or statement, an advertisement
that is current and/or impending (i.e., blood drive, 401K meeting, employee
meeting, safety team meetings, call for monetary contributions to help
fellow employees).

that's what one of my colleagues want as an alt text. I'm considering a
different approach though. The links in this example have the title
attribute with that in it. I'm considering replacing the nav's hyperlinks
with small gifs with rollover images that read that definition. So the
definition will be available as long as the mouse is over the hyperlink.


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