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Thread: Null ALT in Office
Number of posts in this thread: 9 (In chronological order)
From: Karen Sorensen
Date: Tue, May 28 2013 2:20PM
Subject: Null ALT in Office
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I thought that "" created null alt text in MS Word? Am I just making that
up? I know the html attribute is alt="", but does that not translate into
putting "" in the description field of the Alt window in Word 2010?
Karen M. Sorensen
Accessibility Advocate for Online Courses
www.pcc.edu/access
Portland Community College
971-722-4720
From: Cliff Tyllick
Date: Tue, May 28 2013 5:07PM
Subject: Re: Null ALT in Office
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Ooh—I meant to answer this last week!
The kludgy way to identify null alt in Office is " ". Enter double quote-space-double quote in the Description field of the Alt Text of the element and JAWS, at least, will ignore it.
Create a PDF, though, and you have an element with alt text of " ". You then have to select it and identify it as an artifact.
Cliff Tyllick
Austin, Texas
From: Jukka K. Korpela
Date: Wed, May 29 2013 12:50AM
Subject: Re: Null ALT in Office
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2013-05-28 23:20, Karen Sorensen wrote:
> I thought that "" created null alt text in MS Word? Am I just making that
> up? I know the html attribute is alt="", but does that not translate into
> putting "" in the description field of the Alt window in Word 2010?
I was at first a bit puzzled: I did not know you can create alt texts in
Word. And this feature is oddly hidden in the user interface: you need
to right-click an image and then select "Size"!
Using "" there, with the quotation marks literally included, results in
using that two-character string literally. When you Save as HTML, you
get alt="""", which is not what you want. The same probably
happens when saving in other formats.
Using an empty string, i.e. deleting the default string (taken from
image file name) and writing nothing instead, results in no alt
attribute in HTML.
Some other authoring tools have the same (mis)feature: they just cannot
distinguish lack of alternative text from an empty alternative text.
I guess the best workaround is to type in a space character. This
results in alt=" ", which is of course distinct from alt="", but mostly
the difference does not matter. Usually alt="" is (properly) used for
decorative images that have no message that could reasonably be
presented in text, and it tells user agents to ignore the img tag if the
image is not rendered. Telling user agents to use a space is technically
different, but should mostly have the same effect.
Theoretically, it might be argued that if you cannot make the
alternative text empty, you should set it to a zero-width character,
such as U+200B ZERO WIDTH SPACE, but entering it is nontrivial (though
possible) in Word, and who knows how it might affect different user
agents in reality? (U+0000 NULL might seem appropriate at character
level, but it isn't even allowed in HTML.)
Yucca
From: Whitney Quesenbery
Date: Wed, May 29 2013 6:20AM
Subject: Re: Null ALT in Office
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Yucca: 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
For a set of great materials on accessible office documents (by version,
not just by product): http://adod.idrc.ocad.ca/
On Wed, May 29, 2013 at 2:50 AM, Jukka K. Korpela < = EMAIL ADDRESS REMOVED = >wrote:
> 2013-05-28 23:20, Karen Sorensen wrote:
>
> > I thought that "" created null alt text in MS Word? Am I just making that
> > up? I know the html attribute is alt="", but does that not translate into
> > putting "" in the description field of the Alt window in Word 2010?
>
> I was at first a bit puzzled: I did not know you can create alt texts in
> Word. And this feature is oddly hidden in the user interface: you need
> to right-click an image and then select "Size"!
>
> Using "" there, with the quotation marks literally included, results in
> using that two-character string literally. When you Save as HTML, you
> get alt="""", which is not what you want. The same probably
> happens when saving in other formats.
>
> Using an empty string, i.e. deleting the default string (taken from
> image file name) and writing nothing instead, results in no alt
> attribute in HTML.
>
> Some other authoring tools have the same (mis)feature: they just cannot
> distinguish lack of alternative text from an empty alternative text.
>
> I guess the best workaround is to type in a space character. This
> results in alt=" ", which is of course distinct from alt="", but mostly
> the difference does not matter. Usually alt="" is (properly) used for
> decorative images that have no message that could reasonably be
> presented in text, and it tells user agents to ignore the img tag if the
> image is not rendered. Telling user agents to use a space is technically
> different, but should mostly have the same effect.
>
> Theoretically, it might be argued that if you cannot make the
> alternative text empty, you should set it to a zero-width character,
> such as U+200B ZERO WIDTH SPACE, but entering it is nontrivial (though
> possible) in Word, and who knows how it might affect different user
> agents in reality? (U+0000 NULL might seem appropriate at character
> level, but it isn't even allowed in HTML.)
>
> Yucca
>
>
>
> > > >
--
Whitney Quesenbery
www.wqusability.com | @whitneyq
Storytelling for User Experience
www.rosenfeldmedia.com/books/storytelling
Global UX: Design and research in a connected world
@globalUX | www.amazon.com/gp/product/012378591X/
From: Jukka K. Korpela
Date: Wed, May 29 2013 8:03AM
Subject: Re: Null ALT in Office
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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
From: Pratik Patel
Date: Wed, May 29 2013 8:07AM
Subject: Re: Null ALT in Office
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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.
From: Cliff Tyllick
Date: Wed, May 29 2013 9:31AM
Subject: Re: Null ALT in Office
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Pratik, that's true, and the interface in Word 2010 might even depend on whether you're editing a 2007 .docx versus a 2010 .docx. (I haven't tested that carefully.)
In Office 2007, the place for adding alt text was generally under "Size," but as I recall it did vary based on the type of item. Pictures were different from Clip Art which were different from Charts which were different from… and so on.
And before I said to put an empty space between the quotes—I think I'm recalling Word 2007 or even 2003, where just an empty space (no quotes) was the kludgy fix. In Word 2010 (all of Office 2010), it's two double quotes—""—just as Jukka said.
Which, of course, doesn't get converted to the appropriate tagging when the document is saved as either HTML or PDF. And that's why I consider this method to be not just an afterthought, as Jukka has noted, but also a hack.
To further the complications, Word for Mac OS has a different code base, which is not a bad thing in itself. But Microsoft gives that as the reason that alt text is not supported at all in Office 2008 for Mac. (I don't know about later versions.)
Indeed, I haven't yet heard of a word processor for Mac OS that does offer the ability to associate alt text with illustrations.
Cliff
From: Whitney Quesenbery
Date: Wed, May 29 2013 5:48PM
Subject: Re: Null ALT in Office
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Office 2011 + a maintenance release was the first version to support alt
text. It's pretty consistent, in the US version: right click on any sort of
object and you get a format option, and Alt Text is the last item in the
format pane menu.
I've never been cheered when I told a training class that they needed an
update before, but in one case, someone was thrilled because they finally
had a strong reason why they absolutely positively had to have the new
version.
Now, if they would just make the Mac versions produce tagged PDF files.
On Wed, May 29, 2013 at 11:31 AM, Cliff Tyllick < = EMAIL ADDRESS REMOVED = >wrote:
> Pratik, that's true, and the interface in Word 2010 might even depend on
> whether you're editing a 2007 .docx versus a 2010 .docx. (I haven't tested
> that carefully.)
>
> In Office 2007, the place for adding alt text was generally under "Size,"
> but as I recall it did vary based on the type of item. Pictures were
> different from Clip Art which were different from Charts which were
> different from
and so on.
>
> And before I said to put an empty space between the quotesI think I'm
> recalling Word 2007 or even 2003, where just an empty space (no quotes) was
> the kludgy fix. In Word 2010 (all of Office 2010), it's two double
> quotes""just as Jukka said.
>
> Which, of course, doesn't get converted to the appropriate tagging when
> the document is saved as either HTML or PDF. And that's why I consider this
> method to be not just an afterthought, as Jukka has noted, but also a hack.
>
> To further the complications, Word for Mac OS has a different code base,
> which is not a bad thing in itself. But Microsoft gives that as the reason
> that alt text is not supported at all in Office 2008 for Mac. (I don't know
> about later versions.)
>
>
> Indeed, I haven't yet heard of a word processor for Mac OS that does offer
> the ability to associate alt text with illustrations.
>
> Cliff
>
>
>
> > From: Pratik Patel < = EMAIL ADDRESS REMOVED = >
> To: 'WebAIM Discussion List' < = EMAIL ADDRESS REMOVED = >
> Sent: Wednesday, May 29, 2013 9:07 AM
> Subject: Re: [WebAIM] Null ALT in Office
>
>
> 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.
>
>
>
From: Elle
Date: Thu, May 30 2013 6:49PM
Subject: Re: Null ALT in Office
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Just a note - alt text is supported now in Mac versions of MS Word and
PowerPoint.
If you want to build a ship, don't drum up the people to gather wood,
divide the work, and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast
and endless sea.
- Antoine De Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince
On Wed, May 29, 2013 at 7:48 PM, Whitney Quesenbery < = EMAIL ADDRESS REMOVED = >wrote:
> Office 2011 + a maintenance release was the first version to support alt
> text. It's pretty consistent, in the US version: right click on any sort of
> object and you get a format option, and Alt Text is the last item in the
> format pane menu.
>
> I've never been cheered when I told a training class that they needed an
> update before, but in one case, someone was thrilled because they finally
> had a strong reason why they absolutely positively had to have the new
> version.
>
> Now, if they would just make the Mac versions produce tagged PDF files.
>
>
>
>
> On Wed, May 29, 2013 at 11:31 AM, Cliff Tyllick < = EMAIL ADDRESS REMOVED =
> >wrote:
>
> > Pratik, that's true, and the interface in Word 2010 might even depend on
> > whether you're editing a 2007 .docx versus a 2010 .docx. (I haven't
> tested
> > that carefully.)
> >
> > In Office 2007, the place for adding alt text was generally under "Size,"
> > but as I recall it did vary based on the type of item. Pictures were
> > different from Clip Art which were different from Charts which were
> > different from
and so on.
> >
> > And before I said to put an empty space between the quotesI think I'm
> > recalling Word 2007 or even 2003, where just an empty space (no quotes)
> was
> > the kludgy fix. In Word 2010 (all of Office 2010), it's two double
> > quotes""just as Jukka said.
> >
> > Which, of course, doesn't get converted to the appropriate tagging when
> > the document is saved as either HTML or PDF. And that's why I consider
> this
> > method to be not just an afterthought, as Jukka has noted, but also a
> hack.
> >
> > To further the complications, Word for Mac OS has a different code base,
> > which is not a bad thing in itself. But Microsoft gives that as the
> reason
> > that alt text is not supported at all in Office 2008 for Mac. (I don't
> know
> > about later versions.)
> >
> >
> > Indeed, I haven't yet heard of a word processor for Mac OS that does
> offer
> > the ability to associate alt text with illustrations.
> >
> > Cliff
> >
> >
> >
> > > > From: Pratik Patel < = EMAIL ADDRESS REMOVED = >
> > To: 'WebAIM Discussion List' < = EMAIL ADDRESS REMOVED = >
> > Sent: Wednesday, May 29, 2013 9:07 AM
> > Subject: Re: [WebAIM] Null ALT in Office
> >
> >
> > 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.
> >
> >
> >