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RE: Complication of the alt text issue

for

From: Jim Thatcher
Date: Mar 12, 2002 4:00PM

Think about what it is like to listen to the alt text. You chose "Products
and Services" for the text on the button. Then "Products and services"
should be the alt text. If you want to give more information for a
mouse-over, use the title attribute for stuff like, "Details on the products
and services we offer, and what they can do for you" - but please not all
that in the alt text. See the discussion of alt text style in the web
course, http://jimthatcher.com/webcourse2.htm.

Jim
Accessibility Consulting
There's a new book on Web Accessibility. For information:
http://jimthatcher.com.

-----Original Message-----
From: Lisa Halabi [mailto: <EMAIL REMOVED> ]
Sent: Tuesday, March 12, 2002 4:48 PM
To: Webaim-Forum
Subject: FW: Complication of the alt text issue


Dear All,

I'm having difficulties trying to help a colleague solve the thorny issue of
what to put on Alt tags as part of a massive redesign to make our Company
site ultra accessible. I've seen this issue discussed countless times and
thought it was all clear and simple, but not so! Please see the email below.
Basically, we can't decide on the appropriate level of detail to include,
especially as we want to show the keyboard short cuts in the Alt tags as
well. I'd appreciate any comments you might have.

The url to the site is www.usabilitybydesign.com
Many thanks in advance.
Lisa

Lisa Halabi
Senior Usability & Accessibility Consultant
Events Coordinator - UK Usability Professionals Assoc.
www.usabilitybydesign.com
Email: <EMAIL REMOVED>
Tel: +44 (0)7956 280 447

-----Original Message-----
From: Gary Bunker
Sent: 12 March 2002 15:16
To: Lisa Halabi
Cc: Paul Chandler
Subject: Complication of the alt text issue


Lisa,

a slight complication.

To sum up, current alt text is in a long form, explaining what can be found.
For example for the products/services button it is "Details on the products
and services we offer, and what they can do for you"

Problem being that they don't provide the actual name of the button
(products and services) and are quite long, so that blind users have to
listen to the entire alt text and then decide which section they are
navigating to.

Your initial proposal was to shorten them to just the name of the section,
i.e. "Products and services" - however that makes it easier to listen to but
provides no feedback on the content of the section being visited.

We had come to an agreement that the best approach is to shorten the alt
text to something like "Products: For usability products and services" -
short enough not to be too annoying to blind users but long enough to
provide some hint to sighted users of the content to be found.

However, we also currently use the alt text to explain to blind users that a
quick key is available. So the current alt text is actually
"Details on the products and services we offer, and what they can do for
you.

Alt + 'P' to select"

Obviously if we go with the solution we just proposed we lose the shortcut
key information - making it much harder for both sighted and visually
impaired users to learn those shortcuts.

Any suggestions?




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