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Re: alt text and captions

for

From: Andrew Kirkpatrick
Date: Feb 5, 2004 6:10PM

Another possibility to consider is that it may be worthwhile to provide some
sort of image identifier in the alt text. If people are likely to be
discussing the page contents, they might refer to the images in the
discussion. The screen reader user would not have the same context clues as
the sighted user in this case so it could be worthwhile to mark the image
alt as (for example) "figure 1" and then the caption appearing after the
image could be "figure 1: net gain in productivity" (and in this case
there'd be a need for a longdesc also...).

AWK

>
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: Rachel Tanenhaus [mailto: <EMAIL REMOVED> ]
>
>
>> 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? Right now, the caption and the alt text are identical,
>> and we're
>> wondering if that's a usability issue, or if it's just plain redundant
>> and annoying, or what? How does one handle repetitive text like that?
>> I suspect that a blank alt attribute (<alt="">) is inappropriate.
>
>
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