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Re: alt text and captions

for

From: Jukka K. Korpela
Date: Feb 5, 2004 11:00AM

On Thu, 5 Feb 2004, Rachel Tanenhaus wrote:

> If a graphic is being used on a web site, and its caption is essentially
> a description of the picture being shown, what should be in the alt
> text?

This depends on the content and the informational purpose of the image,
and might best be discussed in the context of a particular page.
And what does it mean that the caption is a description?

> Right now, the caption and the alt text are identical

That's hardly a good idea. It will result in the same text being spoken,
shown, or otherwise presented to the user.

For example, if the image is a photo of a person and the caption is his
name, then I would use alt="[photo of NN]" where NN is the name.
The bracket convention, used to indicate that the text is not really a
replacement but a description or reference, is far from universally
accepted, and might cause minor problems at times, but it sounds
reasonable to me.

Quite often the image and its caption would best be just omitted when
images cannot be displayed, but there's no way to achieve that, so it's
best to make the alt text some _indication_ that tells that the text to
come might relate to the image.

--
Jukka "Yucca" Korpela, http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/


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