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Re: alt text and captions

for

From: Christopher Phillips
Date: Feb 5, 2004 10:49AM

Rachel,
It seems to me that the purpose of a caption is generally to provide
some type of commentary or explanation
of an image, not a description of the image itself. If the caption is
simply repeating with text the exact same
information that the image is presenting, then is it really necessary?
For example, an appropriate alt tag may
be 'Picture of a young girl sitting at a desk and typing on a computer'
and a caption for that picture may be 'Here
we can see Elizabeth working on her english assignment.' The alt tag
wouldn't be appropriate to use as the
caption, nor the other way around. While I'm sure there are exceptions
to this, it seems that most of the time
the alt tag should provide a description of the image and the caption
can then assign further meaning to what
the alt tag has described.

Christopher Phillips
Institute for Community Inclusion
100 Morrissey Blvd.
Boston, MA 02125

Curb Cut Learning
http://www.communityinclusion.org/curbcut/

On Feb 5, 2004, at 10:18 AM, Rachel Tanenhaus wrote:

> Hello!
>
> You make an excellent point, but no, the caption is not part of the
> graphic. It's text. So JAWS users would have no problem accessing it.
>
>
> -Rachel
>


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