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Re: Alt Tags length

for

From: Jukka K. Korpela
Date: Aug 5, 2003 3:18PM

On Tue, 5 Aug 2003, John Britsios wrote:

> Can someone tell how many characters including spaces may someone use
> for ALT tags??
> I ask, while someone told me that JAWS reads up to 60.

There's no upper limit in principle, but practical considerations suggest
that we should try to keep alt attribute values shorter than 50
characters. There are some notes on this at
http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/html/alt.html#length
and they actually relate to visible presentation of alt attributes.

This does not mean that essential information should be truncated. If an
adequate replacement for an image requires more than 50 characters,
the author should consider other approaches, like making the image
a link to a file containing a textual equivalent.

I just downloaded JAWS 4.5 manual via
http://www.freedomscientific.com/fs_support/doc_screenreaders.asp
and as far as I can see, on the basis of a quick look, I would say that
there's no limitation on length there. At least not in the part where I
would expect to find a note on a limitation, namely in "Graphics
Options", which explains that you make JAWS read primarily the title
attribute of an image, or primarily the alt attribute (this is the
default), or primarily the onmouseover tooltip, or use the longest of
these. - But older versions might have limitations.

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


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