Re: alt text & punctuation - best practice?

> It is very confusing and frustrating when I look at the W3C site 
> and see images with text in use, but read on this list that they 

These are mainly, if not exclusively logos, which are really 
symbols that sometimes look like text.  You can tell that the W3C
logo isn't just text as images because the alternative text is
a lot more than just "W3C".

When people object to text as images it is when the "products"
menu item is an image of the word "products".

Incidentally, one text as images issue that hasn't been raised
yet is that if you put the page through something like Babelfish,
the image won't be translated and and a visual user won't see
the text (I haven't checked if Babelfish even translates alternative
text), unless they hover on a browser that presents it as a tooltip.

Babelfish is a rather low level translator, so is largely immune to the
idea that proper markup makes it easier for machine processing to add
value, but it still can only tranlate text.

Received on Wednesday, 23 June 2004 16:31:21 UTC