RE: alt title and links

What about:

<a href="search.html"><img
    src="magnifyingglass.gif"
    alt="Search (Note: icon is a magnifying glass)"
    ></a>

To me, this seems to include the benefits of both. First, it identifies the
purpose of the control: to bring up the search page. Second, it describes
the visual clue that identifies that function: an icon of a magnifying
glass.

The benefit, as I see it, is that now the VI user knows both, so she can get
to the search page, but she can also write an email to her non-VI friend and
say "just click on the magnifying glass icon to go to the search page."

I've been playing around with this one for a while. It doesn't work for
everything, but for controls it seems to offer the best of both worlds. (And
it solves the problem with which takes precedence, title or alt.)

Chas. Munat



> -----Original Message-----
> From: w3c-wai-gl-request@w3.org [mailto:w3c-wai-gl-request@w3.org]On
> Behalf Of Alan J. Flavell
> Sent: Sunday, August 19, 2001 7:42 AM
> To: Matt May
> Cc: WAI Guidelines List
> Subject: Re: alt title and links
>
>
> On Fri, 17 Aug 2001, Matt May wrote:
>
> > is preferable to this:
> >
> > <a href="search.html" title="Search"><img
> src="magnifyingglass.gif" alt="a
> > magnifying glass"></a>
>
> But this is clearly suboptimal in terms of underlying principles, as
> well as being less preferable subjectively as you say.  The purpose of
> this image is to link to a search page, and so the _alt_ attribute of
> the img should, in my estimation, be alt="Search".
>
> The img _title_ could perfectly well be title="a magnifying glass",
> since that is indeed a brief description of the image.
>
> In this particular example, the title attribute of the a href, and
> the alt attribute of the img, seem to be converging on the same thing,
> which makes them seem redundant.  But it wouldn't always be as simple
> as that.
>
> best regards
>
>
>

Received on Monday, 20 August 2001 06:11:01 UTC