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Re: Prices as Alt Text

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From: Jukka K. Korpela
Date: Feb 28, 2015 2:44AM

2015-02-28, 5:20, Thad C wrote:

> What is the best practice for authoring dollar amounts in image alt text.
> Would I use $9.99 or spell it out nine dollars ninety nine?

We can try to formulate alt texts primarily for use in speech synthesis,
since this can be expected to be their most important use from the
accessibility point of view. However, I don’t think we should write all
numbers in words. It would appear too odd in other uses of alt texts,
e.g., in visual display in place of the image when the image is not
available for some reason. Moreover, we can expect speech synthesis to
be able to handle $9.99 reasonably; it it does not, the user will have
problems with such notations when they appear in normal text.

On such grounds, alt texts should normally be written as you would write
in normal text. But in borderline cases, give preference to expressing
things in words rather than symbols.

On the other hand, styled text is generally better than images even when
proper alt texts are used. Now that downloadable fonts can be used in a
cross-browser way, consider putting the prices as text in elements for
which you set font, background, color, border, etc. as needed to achieve
the desired visual appearance.

Yucca