[thelist] Accesibility Tip

[Mark Groen]

The accessible web sites thread has actually turned into some work for me! I
have a client whose site will be hosted by myself, and originally I thought
that I would be building the web site too. A few days ago, got an email from
their marketing guy that said "Have a look at the new web site and tell us
what you think". At first, I was kind of p.o.'ed that work that was for me was
done by someone else with a copy of Dreamweaver. Turns out the design
itself was not too bad really - clean, easy to get around the site etc. but there
was nothing in it for alt tags and of course there was the code bloat of using
a wysiwyg editor by a non-programmer.
To make a long story shorter, I explained in the nicest way possible that
although it was a great design there were some issues regarding the
underlying code, and also the accessibility factors. They agreed that
something should be done, and although I didn't get the entire amount for
creating the site myslf from scratch, I did work out a deal to clean up the
code to W3C specs and make it accessible. They got a better site (cleaning
up the code from Dreamweaver cut the file size by MORE than half -
surprised even me) and I got a chunk of (albeit smaller but better than
nothing), change for my efforts too.

<tip type="html" author="Mark Groen">
Use both the title and alt attributes on your images to satisfy the ADA et al,
and get greater control over the display of your pages. If you don't want the
Tool Tip effect showing up over an image or nav bar you can use a blank
title attribute like title="" and nothing will show up on the page, but the
information in the alt tags will still be read by screen readers and keep your
site accessible. The title attribute can be used on any element on the page
also, for example a hyperlink with a Tool Tip effect that describes where the
link will take your site visitor.
</tip>