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Re: Null ALT in Office

for

From: Pratik Patel
Date: May 29, 2013 8:07AM


Here is another wrinkle in the Word alt attribute story. You will notice
that the menu item is different depending on whether you're editing the
older .doc type document or the newer .docx type document.


-----Original Message-----
From: <EMAIL REMOVED>
[mailto: <EMAIL REMOVED> ] On Behalf Of Jukka K. Korpela
Sent: Wednesday, May 29, 2013 10:03 AM
To: <EMAIL REMOVED>
Subject: Re: [WebAIM] Null ALT in Office

2013-05-29 15:20, Whitney Quesenbery wrote:

> A small correction: you don't have to select "size" but "format
> picture" (or shape or object). Alt text is in the format panel in all of
> the Microsoft Office products

When I wrote about selecting "size", it was actually based on
back-translating from the Finnish text in the version of MS Word 2007
I'm using, in a situation where I had inserted an image from a file.
This could be a localization difference. But in the same version, if I
add e.g. a ClipArt image, then the contextual menu (right-click menu)
does not have a "size" entry, but it has a "format" entry (well, the
Finnish language equivalent).

So MS Office isn't very consistent in the way the alt text can be added.
And in both of these cases, this function is in a menu that otherwise
deals with the visual appearance of the image (and is named according to
that). I think this is because adding alt text has been added as an
afterthought rather than a well-planned feature.

Yucca