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Re: Useful Alt Text?

for

From: YOUNGV5
Date: Jun 15, 2011 8:24AM

@Jukka:

I mentioned this to Jennifer. I think you might have missed my previous
reply yesterday:

Although it is WCAG 2.0 Level AAA, allowing links to be read out of
context is very helpful. Screen reader users may pull up a list of links
by pressing the JAWS (Insert) + F7 key. Hearing a bunch or even one "More
Info" link is not very user friendly. Possibly try "More Info about blah
blah blah".

I think we have squashed this issue. One last comment: if for some
reason you *NEED* to only show the text read more, try hiding the rest of
this text with the following technique:

http://yaccessibilityblog.com/library/css-clip-hidden-content.html

Vincent Young
Web Accessibility Specialist
User Experience Team
Nationwide®
o | 614·677·5094
c | 614·607·3400
e | <EMAIL REMOVED>




From:
"Jukka K. Korpela" < <EMAIL REMOVED> >
To:
<EMAIL REMOVED>
Date:
06/15/2011 10:09 AM
Subject:
Re: [WebAIM] Useful Alt Text?
Sent by:
<EMAIL REMOVED>



<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/