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RE: Help on approach for annotating images

for

From: Malcolm Wotton
Date: Dec 1, 2005 3:40AM


Hi,

Thanks for the helpful links, unfortunately I don't quite 'get it' yet.
Here's some more information . . .

I have identified 3 types of image on my site:

1) purely decorative images (curvy borders etc). These are displayed using
div tags and CSS they have no text associated with them

2) 'content' images eg posters advertising events. In this case the
information (date time price etc) is replicated in the alt tag, but there is
no caption. If you can see the image you can read the same info.

3) 'other' :( These comprise mostly of photos of events, generally they are
in articles that describe the event although the particular image may not be
referenced directly. An example would be a picture of a dance group
performing. A specific example is:

'Local morris dancers performing at Brighton'

In this case I have used it as the alt text and the caption, as for readers
that can see the image the info about Brighton would be of use. This is the
case that leads to duplication. For something like this could you suggest a
way forward . . .

Thanks

Malcolm

> -----Original Message-----
> From: <EMAIL REMOVED>
> [mailto: <EMAIL REMOVED> ]On Behalf Of Jukka K.
> Korpela
> Sent: 01 December 2005 10:10
> To: WebAIM Discussion List
> Subject: Re: [WebAIM] Help on approach for annotating images
>
>
> On Wed, 30 Nov 2005, Malcolm Wotton wrote:
>
> > First I couldn't find how to browse the message history so I
> don't know if
> > my main question has already be answered.
>
> The archives can be found at http://www.webaim.org/discussion/archives
> and they have a search facility (though it's often difficult to search
> for information like the one you're after, since it cannot be described
> a few distinctive keywords - some people would refer to annotations of
> images, some to captions of images, some to titles of images, etc.).
>
> > I've recently added ALT text to all images in a site I'm
> developing. For the
> > normal browsing experience some images have captions (which will be
> > identical to the ALT text) and some do not.
>
> A caption should usually not be the same as the ALT text.
>
> > Captions are implemented as
> > normal text underneath the image.
>
> That's a bit problematic, but there is no good solution, since
> HTML has no
> markup for image captions; see
> http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/www/captions.html
> I mention this because the technique used may affect the question about
> appropriate ALT text. In particular, if you decide to embed the caption
> into the image itself and the image is only an illustration of something
> that has been explained verbally in the text, alt="" would be adequate
> (somewhat debatably, since it deprives some users of access to the image
> even if they could benefit from it, namely people who surf with a graphic
> browser without automatic loading and display of images).
>
> > If I browse the site with lynx for those
> > with captions I see both the ALT text and the caption (ie a
> duplication).
>
> Technically, that's what should be expected to happen.
>
> > Is this acceptable?
>
> Usually not.
>
> > Should I remove the ALT text from image that have a caption?
>
> Certainly not. But you might modify it. This really depends what
> the image
> is about, what it is supposed to convey, etc. For example, if the page
> contains recent news and the image is a photo of some event and the photo
> shows some people shaking hands when meeting, it might be appropriate to
> write a caption like "Presidents Foo and Bar met in Paris,
> France", but it
> it would pointless to duplicate this in the alt text. Rather, you
> could write alt="(photo of the meeting)". This makes the presence
> of the caption text understandable when the page is presented as plain
> text or as speech.
>
> See "Captions and accessibility" at
> http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/www/captions.html#acc
>
> See also Understanding Guideline 1.1: Provide text alternatives for all
> non-text content in the WCAG 2.0 draft:
> http://www.w3.org/TR/UNDERSTANDING-WCAG20/#text-equiv
>
> --
> Jukka "Yucca" Korpela, http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/
>
>
>
>
>
>
> --
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