- From: Lauke PH <P.H.Lauke@salford.ac.uk>
- Date: Mon, 7 Jul 2003 09:43:40 +0100
- To: "W3C / WAI" <w3c-wai-ig@w3.org>
Maybe a bit off topic, but I'll tell the story anyway: some time ago I was advising a designer on how to make a specific site he was working on more accessible. He turned around and showed me a page he had previously done...which was essentially an HTML page containing one giant JPEG, full of text. He then proudly told me how all the text was stuffed in the ALT attribute. I had to explain to him that, first of all, the entire ALT text was not structured. Bringing up the page in Lynx showed everything as one big, long sentence. Section headings etc were undistinguishable from normal text. Bullet points he had "faked" by using dashes and newlines in the ALT simply displayed all inline. It was a complete mess. And yes, once I ran it through JAWS, the screenreader stopped after about 60 characters or so. The look on his face was priceless when he told me: "I thought accessibility was about making sure all your images have ALT attributes..." Right, apologies for the OT anecdote. Patrick p.s.: wir sehen uns wohl auf sitepointforums in ner weile ;) (redux) ________________________________ Patrick H. Lauke Webmaster / University of Salford http://www.salford.ac.uk -----Original Message----- From: John Britsios [mailto:webmaster@webnauts.net] Sent: 06 July 2003 18:18 To: W3C / WAI Subject: Alt Tags Can anyone tell, how many characters including spaces can an ALT tag have? I heard max. 60, while JAWS can read only 60. Do you have any info or better, resources for that? Thanks for your support in advance, John S. Britsios, Web Accessibility and Usability Consultant Webnauts Net Web Accessibility & Usability Consultants Wilbrandstr. 77 D-33604 Bielefeld Germany UMS: +49-(0)700-WEBNAUTS HOME: http://www.webnauts.net ACADEMY: http://www.webnauts-akademie.de (German) SHOP: http://shop.webnauts.net (German) "For people without disabilities, technology makes things convenient. For people with disabilities, it makes things possible."
Received on Monday, 7 July 2003 04:44:47 UTC