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Alt Tags length and Content

for

From: Jericho
Date: Aug 5, 2003 5:23PM

While we are on the subject of Alt tags...

I have noticed that some web sites that use graphical text buttons use alt
text that is very wordy, like "This link will take you to our contacts page
where you can find our email address and phone number", for a button that
simply says CONTACT US. I work with people who use voice recognition to
browse the web and they find this very annoying because they assume that you
would say "Contact Us" to follow the link. Also, screen readers must read
all this verbiage every time that link is passed.

Is there some common standard on this?

Joyce Kennedy
Jericho Consulting

-----Original Message-----
From: Jukka K. Korpela [mailto: <EMAIL REMOVED> ]
Sent: Tuesday, August 05, 2003 5:16 PM
To: <EMAIL REMOVED>
Subject: Re: Alt Tags length


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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