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Re: latest practice on alt text

for

From: Debbie Pomerance
Date: Dec 23, 2008 5:00PM


On Tue, Dec 23, 2008 at 2:17 PM, Jukka K. Korpela < <EMAIL REMOVED> >wrote:

> Angela French wrote:
>
> > I am looking for any research on the use of alternative text for
> > images on web pages that are merely for illustration purposes only.
>
> I don't think there's any recent new information on it - or even that
> research is needed. It's a matter of common sense and becomes obvious as
> soon as you think about the meaning and possible uses of alt texts: they
> are
> supposed to appear, and they usually do appear, in place of an image when
> the image is not displayed.
>
> > Is a page
> > more usable to a screen reader user if alt text is left out under
> > such circumstances?
>
> It is never correct to omit the alt attribute. It is correct to use alt=""
> (or, in some cases, alt=" ") for an image that is purely decorational and
> has no meaningful nonvisual substitute.
>
> There are difficult problems with alt texts (see
> http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/html/alt.html<;http://www.cs.tut.fi/%7Ejkorpela/html/alt.html>;for some discussions), but
> decorative images are simple - except in the sense that many people have
> weird ideas of alt texts and they even think they are
> accessibility-oriented
> when they type alt="decorative image" or alt="nice butterflies".
>
> --
>
Not using alt="nice butterflies" I understand is silly, but why not
alt="decorative image" to denote an image on the page, that is not
substantive, so the non-sighted viewer knows that it is not material to the
sense of the page? I have a logo on my page, should I not give an alt
designation of "company logo" ?

Thank you.

Debbie P.



--

Debbie Pomerance
mailto <EMAIL REMOVED>

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