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Specifying empty alt text in A-Prompt

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From: Jukka K. Korpela
Date: Oct 28, 2003 10:50AM

As many people probably know, A-Prompt is one of the best available tools
for automatic testing of some accessibility issues as well as fixing some
problems as they are detected. Unfortunately it seems that the software is
not under any development or maintenance. (It's available for free from
http://aprompt.snow.utoronto.ca/ )

Now, while writing some instructions for using it, I noticed that I cannot
find a way to specify an empty alt text, alt="", when fixing a page with
A-Prompt. It refuses to accept a change if I specify nothing in the text
box for alt text. What I am currently suggesting is the use of a space and
either leaving it at that (since alt=" " seldom causes problems when
alt="" would have be the most adequate choice) or fixing alt=" " later
using one's favorite authoring problem.

But is there a simpler way? The documentation of A-Prompt clearly mentions
that alt="" is often adequate, so its authors clearly did not
_mean_ to prevent specifying an empty alt text.

--
Jukka "Yucca" Korpela, http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/


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