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Re: Blank alt attributes for images - best practise?

for

From: gez
Date: Oct 6, 2003 8:12AM

Joe Clark's Building Accessible Websites, "The Image Problem"
(http://www.joeclark.org/book/sashay/serialization/Chapter06.html) describes
how to specify the alt attribute for images in detail, and it's all good
advice. To summarise, he advocates using alt="" for images that have no
meaning, such as spacer images. For bullets, he advocates marking them up
properly, and changing the style of the bullet using CSS. If you absolutely
must use a graphic for a bullet that isn't marked up correctly, he suggest
using alt="*".



If your code is semantically correct, and you've separated the style from
the presentation using CSS, there's usually no requirement for empty alt
attributes, or at least it's drastically reduced.



Best regards.



Gez Lemon

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----- Original Message -----
From: "FOX, Jake" < <EMAIL REMOVED> >
To: < <EMAIL REMOVED> >
Sent: Monday, October 06, 2003 3:42 PM
Subject: RE: Blank alt attributes for images - best practise?


> Just a suggestion but there are examples where images have used alt="*"
for
> similar situations.
>
> This at least provides some content in the alt tag and doesn't seem as if
> anything's missing that should be there.
>
> It implies that the tag was meant to be left empty as opposed to being
left
> empty accidentally.
>
>
> would like to hear everyone else's views on this...
>
> -Jake.
>
>
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