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RE: ALT tags vs TITLE tags

for

From: Victoria Hamill
Date: Dec 2, 2003 5:55AM







It's hard sometimes to distinguish between a symptom of something, e.g. ALT
tags cause tooltips, and the actual purpose of the function, e.g. ALT tags
provide some alternative text for users who cannot see the image. Hence my
confusion.

Thanks for clearing that up.

Victoria

-----------------------------------------------------
Victoria Hamill
NetInfo
Phone: (44) 1628-687863
Email: <EMAIL REMOVED>
URL: http://www.netinfo.com
- More than meets the eye



"Karl Groves"
<webmaster@theoryx To: < <EMAIL REMOVED> >, < <EMAIL REMOVED> >
design.com> cc:
Fax to:
02/12/2003 12:08 Subject: RE: ALT tags vs TITLE tags
Please respond to
webaim-forum






It seems that you're looking at using ALT for a tooltip, which is one of
the
things that MS IE does.
ALT attributes are intended to serve as alternative text, not as a tool
tip,
and AFAIK all browsers support the attribute just as they should.
There is no Mac issue with ALT

-Karl




-----Original Message-----
From: Victoria Hamill [mailto: <EMAIL REMOVED> ]
Sent: Tuesday, December 02, 2003 6:57 AM
To: <EMAIL REMOVED>
Subject: ALT tags vs TITLE tags






Hi,

I'm a bit uncertain over what to do about the use of ALT tags on images
when catering for Mac users. I'm not sure why, but ALT tags don't show up
on the Mac - is this normal or am I likely to have got something wrong?

The alternative is to use TITLE tags, as they do work, but I'm not sure
about the impact of doing that in terms of screen readers and so on. I
tried having an ALT tag and a TITLE tag just to see what happened, and the
TITLE tag over-wrote the ALT tag.

What is the correct way of using ALT tags? This seems a pretty banal
question, as in theory alt tags are not complicated!
All the literature I've read around accessibility talks about ALT tags and
Long Descriptions, so I suspect it would not be right to replace them with
TITLEs, so how do other people get around the Mac issue??

Thanks

Victoria
-----------------------------------------------------
Victoria Hamill
NetInfo
Phone: (44) 1628-687863
Email: <EMAIL REMOVED>
URL: http://www.netinfo.com
- More than meets the eye


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