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Re: Useful Alt Text?

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From: Jukka K. Korpela
Date: Jun 15, 2011 8:09AM

<EMAIL REMOVED> wrote:

> With alt="" there is no more issue of a repeated "read More".

There is an issue with "Read More" even when it is not repeated. This is
not about alt text, though repeating "Read More" in alt text would make
things worse of course.

The issue is that "Read More" does not make sense out of context,
especially on page that has several such link texts. And links can and
will be used out of context, too. Many people think links shouldn't be
handled that way, but they are.

So a link to more information should have link text that summarizes the
content of the linked document in a few words. This is somewhat
difficult to authors, because the link appears after some text that has
already summarized some information. But often the link points to the
full text of an article, and then you can use the heading or title of
that article. If it coincides with some text on the linking page, so be
it. (But a well-written news teaser, for example, does not repeat the
full heading of the full story.)

If you can do things that way, then you can use an icon before such
links, and _then_ these icons can and should have non-empty alt texts,
like "Read more:" or "Read the full story:". The user would then hear
such words, or see a corresponding graphic, followed by a link text that
could stand on its own - but here it stands along with an indicator, the
icon, which has a job of its own.

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