[thelist] Accessibility Question

aardvark roselli at earthlink.net
Fri May 31 11:20:00 CDT 2002


> From: Rob Smith <rob.smith at thermon.com>
[...]
> 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?

that's an MS thing... the alt attribute wasn't intended to be
displayed as a tooltip, that was an MS innovation... it comes with a
lot of baggage, though, as people start to put content in there for
sighted readers that can be detrimental to the page itself and
unsighted readers...

> 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.

well, that should definitely go in a title attribute, since it doesn't
describe an image...

but if you need to control how long it displays, as well as other
stylistic elements, i'd suggest exploring DHTML...

> Yet another option is just hide all the *ehem* 5 others like that in a
> help button.

?


--
Read the evolt.org case study
Usability: The Site Speaks for Itself
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1904151035/evoltorg
ISBN: 1904151035



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