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Re: Recommended method for identifying a line in an "Accessible PDF"

for

From: Jukka K. Korpela
Date: Feb 17, 2003 12:30PM

On Mon, 17 Feb 2003, James Gagnier wrote:

> In response to the questions, The standards state that such items as
> horizontal graphical bars bullets and spacers should have alt="" as the alt
> text.

They do? I wouldn't say anything that categorical.

> Since the graphic offers no meaningful content, it does
> not need to be spoken.

What matters is what the graphic is meant to express, in the context of
its use, not what it contains per se.

> On a similar matter, if the horizontal rule is used to separate a section,
> an alt tag with the next section's title may be used for more clarity, that
> is assuming that the text following it isn't marked up with heading <h1>,
> <h2>, etc. which it should be to offer logical structure to the document.

If a document is divided into parts with the use of headings, and with
additional hints given as horizontal bars presented as images, then
alt="" is usually sufficient, since the headings probably are informative
enough. But alt="End of section." wouldn't be wrong. If an image of a
horizontal bar is the _only_ way of indicating a major division, e.g.
at the end of the document content proper, before authorship information
and other details, I would say that a nonempty alt attribute is a must.
It should then be primarily formulated to be useful in speech
presentation, since in visual presentation, the user can usually see the
structure from the appearance. Some more notes on this:
http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/html/alt.html#hr

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


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