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RE: Is "this-or-that logo" adequate in an ALT text?

for

From: Jukka Korpela
Date: Aug 19, 2002 6:18AM

<EMAIL REMOVED> wrote:

> Actually, I would question why they [brackets around an ALT
> attribute value] are used. I've not seen it written
> anywhere to use brackets - have I missed something?

There's probably no official recommendation to use them. Sometimes brackets
are recommended when there is a sequence of images (e.g., a navbar) in order
to make the ALT texts appear as separate instead of running together. What I
suggested is more of a logical move, and something that people have used,
often intuitively. When alt="zap" says 'use the text string zap in place of
this image', then what would you do when zap is not an adequate replacement
for the image, only a description of it? Using brackets or parentheses
sounds rather natural.

For example, if an image is a photo of a building, then a real ALT text
would express in words what the image is intended to say in the context
where it appears, such as saying a few words about the appearance of the
building. Quite often we cannot write such ALT texts, for practical and
other reasons, and then we resort to descriptions.

Maybe I'm wrong, and maybe people can distinguish between real ALT texts and
mere descriptions by intuition. In some cases it's pretty obvious;
alt="Photo of Jukka Korpela" can hardly be mistaken so that those four words
would be taken as an adequate replacement for the image. But there might be
other cases that are less obvious.

Consider the text "[Schroedinger's equation]". To me, this would communicate
the idea that this is refers to an image that actually shows the equation.
Without the brackets, how could I know, without knowing that the text is an
ALT text for an image, that the document actually contains the equation
instead of just mentioning it? Sorry that I can't explain this better. What
I'm trying to say might be this: Good use of ALT texts should make the
document completely understandable in no-images mode without knowing or
guessing that some texts are actually ALT texts for images. Using
descriptive texts as such does not satisfy this.

--
Jukka Korpela, senior adviser
TIEKE Finnish Information Society Development Centre
http://www.tieke.fi
Phone: +358 9 4763 0397 Fax: +358 9 4763 0399




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