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Re: Alt Text in PowerPoint 2010

for

From: Jared Smith
Date: Apr 14, 2011 7:57AM

On Thu, Apr 14, 2011 at 4:59 AM, Karlen Communications
< <EMAIL REMOVED> > wrote:

> BTW a message from the Section 508 list indicates that with SP1 of Office
> 2011 for Mac you can now add Alt Text to images.

More or less. It's under the Format Picture context menu. There are
both "Title" and "Description" options. The explanation notes that
"The screen reader first reads the title. The person can then decide
whether to hear a longer description." As you'll see below, this is
far from accurate.

When saved as HTML, it makes the most ugly, standards non-compliant
HTML I've ever seen - 29KB of HTML for a page that contained only one
image. Much worse than previous versions of Word. I uploaded an
example to http://webaim.org/temp/word2012.htm WARNING: This source
code may cause high levels of nausea.

I'll also note that Word 2012 offers no option for "Filtered HTML".

It also makes the alternative text:
alt="Title: I am the title - Description: I am the description."

It adds "Title: " or "Description: ", even if only one of the boxes is
utilized. And why the " - " in between?

In PowerPoint, it automatically adds the embedded image file name to
the Description field. There is no option (thankfully) to save as
HTML, but like Word, Office 2012 is still incapable of creating
accessible PDF files, so the alternative text is lost when saving as
PDF.

So, Word does precisely what Andrew described as being a "bug". It
doesn't appear to be a bug, but instead an indication that Microsoft
has no idea how image accessibility and web standards are supposed to
work.

I can't believe we still have to deal with this garbage from
Microsoft. And in Office 2012! Adding a basic alt attribute to an
image is not rocket science, is it?

</rant>

Jared