WebAIM - Web Accessibility In Mind

E-mail List Archives

FW: alt text size

for

From: John Foliot
Date: Aug 21, 2006 12:30PM

zara wrote:
> Hi,

And hi to you. Jukka gave a fairly full and concise explanation, so I won't
re-tread the same water; however I suspect that one of the things that is
being considered is the "tool-tip" feature of Internet Explorer attached to
alt text. While this should not be an "expected" behaviour (as it does not
render the same in other browers) many developers use it to include
additional information attached to their image - they think they are doing
the right thing when in fact they are making it worse. (For what it's worth,
a quick check shows that IE will support a fairly long string of characters
in the "tool tip" - more than I would like to see. Opera supports a long
string of TITLE values as a "tool tip", whereas my copy of Firefox cut off
the TITLE text at about 65 characters +/-. NEITHER OF THESE METHODS SHOULD
BE USED TO EXCLUSIVELY CONVEY INFORMATION!)

So, rather than looking a specific numbers of either characters or words,
perhaps a completely different angle of attack should be considered. Alt
text should be kept under approximately 10 words, AND USED TO DESCRIBE WHAT
THE IMAGE IS, rather than what it means. If the image is sufficiently
complex that it requires further explanation then use the LONGDESC
attribute, or better yet, ensure that the corresponding text is visible on
the same page as the complex image (not always easy, I know).

Related to this topic - I have taken to using a particular construct when
declaring my alt texts: alt="[Photo - Catherine Roy]".

1) By using the square brackets, it keeps the alt text separated in text
display browsers (it's a visual thing), especially since sometimes the alt
text alone may seem or appear redundantly redundant:

Catherine Roy Catherine Roy is a wonderful...
vs.
[Photo - Catherine Roy] Catherine Roy is a wonderful...

Note: some screen readers (set to maximum verbosity/read all punctuation)
will announce the presence of the square brackets. It may be a bit much for
them, but by experience very few daily screen reader users have their setups
set to maximum verbosity most of the time. To my mind the pros outweigh the
cons.

2) I also specify the fact that it is a Photo; I also use Image and Icon
as descriptors - my thoughts are that they are consistent, concise and
descriptive: a general "what" followed by a concise explanation:

[Image - W3Q Logo]
[Icon - Adobe Acrobat]

Perhaps hard to mandate into a Standards document, but a consideration for
"best practices"?

Thoughts? Comments?

JF
---
John Foliot
Academic Technology Specialist - Online Accessibility
Stanford University
560 Escondido Mall
Meyer Library 181
Stanford, CA 94305-3093