WebAIM - Web Accessibility In Mind

E-mail List Archives

RE: alt text in 2 languages?

for

From: julian.rickards
Date: Apr 21, 2004 9:04AM

The simple answer is that although you can specify the language in the <img>
tag, lang="it", you can't specify two languages in the image tag and most
certainly, you can't specify a change of language in the alt attribute so
therefore, alt must be in one language, whatever you specify for the
document or specifically in the <img> tag.

I wonder however, if (despite the additional effort) you might create an
image map from the image and specify an alt for the two areas with different
lang attributes. From what I read at
http://blooberry.com/indexdot/html/tagpages/a/area.htm, the <area> tag is
not required to use the href attribute so you don't have to create two links
and the <area> tag does allow the lang attribute. So therefore, if your
image in question is a link, you could use:

<a href="some-page.html"><img src="some-image.gif" width="xx" height="xx"
alt="English text" usemap="#italian-alt" lang="en"></a>

<map name="italian-alt">
<area shape="default" lang="it" alt="Italian text">
</map>

---------------------------------------------------------
Julian Rickards
Digital Publications Distribution Coordinator
Publications Services Section
Ontario Ministry of Northern Development and Mines
Phone: (705) 670-5608
Fax: (705) 670-5690


>