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Re: question about Div tags and content images

for

From: Austin, Darrel
Date: Jan 27, 2005 2:10PM

> 1. Is there a way to place an alternative text attribute to
> communicate information to screen-readers?

Not in a background image.

> 2. Is this just an improper use of the DIV tag and should developers
> be made aware that this image and content should be placed using the
> IMG tag?

Yes.

What you may be seeing is poorly implemented image replacement methods:

http://www.ryznardesign.com/web_coding/image_replacement/

The concept is that you have a div with a span inside it. The span contains
the text. With CSS, you then position the text off-screen and put a
background of the text rendered as an image in the DIV. The idea is that CSS
browsers will see the image, but screen readers will still 'see' the text as
it's part of the source code.

This isn't a perfect method (the above link talks about the different
issues) of course.

The best way to test the sites these developers are showing you is to simply
open the site up in a text browser like Lynx. If you can't see any of the
content, odds are screen readers can't either (as well as rather important
things like Google bot or PDA users, etc.)

-Darrel