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From: Michael D. Roush
Date: Oct 21, 2003 6:25PM

----- Original Message -----
From: "John Foliot - WATS.ca" < <EMAIL REMOVED> >


> Pardon my confusion, but what exactly do you mean by "The full alternative
> text"? Last I checked, alt text is alt text... are you referring to the
alt
> attribute and the title attribute? In the case of your query, why not
> something like alt="softwareprogram icon" title="A program that produces
> accessible client side image maps".

Sorry for the confusion. I was thinking 'the full alternative text' as
opposed to the one word ('image') that the checking software focused on. I
don't think "software program icon" is sufficient alternative text in this
case, because the picture actually tells what the software program *is*. My
link tags surrounding these images have titles in them, but not the image
tags themselves. In any case, my thought wasn't to 'fool the checker' into
giving me a passing mark on accessibility, but to sincerely correct a
problem if there was one.

As was stated in another post, I sincerely believe that the first and last
line of defense in producing accessible content must be the designers
themselves. Content checkers like this one help me after I put a page
together. I can run the same page through three different ones and have
each of the three pick up a different error, errors which would have taken
me a while to find on my own. But, as I said, my desire here is not just to
pass a checker, but to provide truly accessible content.

Perhaps this is a good time for me to re-introduce myself. I was a member
of this list a while back before some life-changes hit me, and I'm glad to
be back. My name is Michael Roush and I am the technology consultant for a
Special Education Regional Resource Center in rural southwest Ohio. I was
first introduced to accessibility after I got the job as webmaster here, and
went to a workshop led by Mike Paciello (btw, anyone know what's up with his
site?) where I learned so many things I was doing wrong. Since then, I
have tried to absorb everything I could about web accessibility.

This December, I will be presenting a 2 hour hands-on workshop on designing
accessible websites at a conference in Dayton, Ohio. (Anyone closeby, give
me a shout!) I have begun setting up my own page for my work
(http://www.AccessRamp.org) which I would welcome feedback about, and any
links you may have that you would like me to add.

> usually a URL or code sample would make things easier here.

I tend to err on the side of caution when posting URL's for my own work.
Especially in this case, the HTML is dynamically generated by PHP and the
page you see when you go there may not have the image originally in question
on it - it is one of a bank of 24 which are only displayed 10 at a time.
Here is the code sample in particular:
<xmp>
<p class='sidebar'><a href='http://www.abdn.ac.uk/tools/ibmpc/mapthis'
title='Map This!'><img src='./images/mapthis.jpg' alt='MapThis - a
client-side image map designer.' height='40' width='100'
border='0'></a></p>
</xmp>

Thanks!


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