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RE: alt tags on many images

for

From: Larry G. Hull
Date: Mar 4, 2004 8:57AM

Jake,

You or the "young web developer from college or a tech school" (or
perhaps an intern?) need to remember that the text itself should be
short, descriptive, and not necessarily replicate the title or a
piece of text near the image. The repetition can be annoying.

Digression
I recently saw a page where the text title for the image was repeated
as the alt text but with square brackets added to distinguish it from
the visible text when read by assistive technolgy, i.e.,
alt="[title]". Is this an acceptable convention?
End Digression

Don't overlook the possibility that, depending upon context and
purpose, the content of the image may need to be more precisely
described with a long description using the longdesc attribute
(and/or a D-tag).

Larry

Permanent email address: <EMAIL REMOVED>

Business address: NASA
Goddard Space Flight Center
Code 588.0
Greenbelt, MD 20771

Lead, Information Systems Division Technology Intelligence Center (TIC)
Accessibility Engineer, Advanced Architectures and Automation Branch
Instructor, NASA/GSFC Section 508 Accessibility Training

At 9:34 AM -0500 3/4/04, <EMAIL REMOVED> wrote:
> > -----Original Message-----
>> From: FOX, Jake
>
>> We are currently building a huge news archive which has
>> around 1,200 pages.
>> Each page has a photographic image (some of which are quite abstract).
>> Currently none of these images contain alt tags. It would be
>> an enormous
>> effort to go through each page individually and assign a
>> descriptive alt tag
>> to every image - is there a way round this problem?
>
>You are not going to like what I have to say but it probably has to be said.
>If these photos actually add content to the page, then they must have alt
>text. In fact, (I only recently learned this) alt is a *required* attribute
>of the <img> tag and it should have been used right from the outset.
>
>Perhaps you could hire a young web developer from college or a tech school
>to get some experience and a short term job to assist you.

--
Permanent email address: <EMAIL REMOVED>

Business address: NASA
Goddard Space Flight Center
Code 588.0
Greenbelt, MD 20771

FAX: 301-286-1768

Lead, Information Systems Division Technology Intelligence Center (TIC)
Accessibility Engineer, Advanced Architectures and Automation Branch
Instructor, NASA/GSFC Section 508 Accessibility Training
http://ohrcoursecatalog.gsfc.nasa.gov/search/description.cfm?course=88
http://ohrcoursecatalog.gsfc.nasa.gov/search/description.cfm?course=1160 (NEW)


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