WebAIM - Web Accessibility In Mind

E-mail List Archives

Re: Character limit on alt-text in PDF?

for

From: Olaf Drümmer
Date: Jul 1, 2013 9:08AM

Based on observations made in a number of seminars on accessible PDFs I have done in the last months it became very clear to me that getting accessibility right is cheapest when as much as possible can be done on the editorial level (whether that's for online content or PDFs). A good strategy is always: if you have content that would be presented with lots of visuals but without text just add the respective text somewhere else. As long as content is distributed electronically there is always enough space!

For example - if you have some business graphics, just grab that Excel spreadsheet, and insert it as a table next to the business graphic (or if that's not an option, in the appendix); then point to it (or in the case of the annex, link to it), and all you need to add as alternate text/description is a pointer to the text based version of the data.


Olaf


On 1 Jul 2013, at 16:28, McMorland, Gabriel wrote:

> We sometimes need long descriptions to describe complex diagrams, flowcharts, or maps.
>
> I'm not running into a technical character limit, but I'm interested in design choices others have made.
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: <EMAIL REMOVED> [mailto: <EMAIL REMOVED> ] On Behalf Of Olaf Drümmer
> Sent: Friday, June 28, 2013 4:03 PM
> To: WebAIM Discussion List
> Subject: Re: [WebAIM] Character limit on alt-text in PDF?
>
> Hi Gabe,
>
> there is no strict limit. Some will assume that having an alt text longer than 32 kilobytes (32767 bytes) might not be a good idea.
>
> What kind of limit are you running into? Why would you have to have a very long description to begin with?
>
>
> Olaf
>
>
> On 28 Jun 2013, at 20:43, McMorland, Gabriel wrote:
>
>> Is there a character limit on the alt-text for images in PDFs?
>> If not, then how long is too long?
>>
>> Also, where do you usually put long descriptions for complex images in PDFs hosted on a website? If it was HTML I could use longdesc, but I'm not sure where to put them with the PDFs used in our online courses.
>>
>> Thanks for your thoughts,
>> Gabe
>> >> >> list messages to <EMAIL REMOVED>
>
> > > > >