Re: title inclusion

>What would you suggest as a good way to explain the difference 
>between "alt" and "title" on images?

I have been working up to making the case that all the WCAG 
documents, even the normative ones, should be written in a much more 
conversational form.

I would thus advance the proposal that an explanation of alt, title, 
and longdesc could read as follows-- informal and immediately 
understandable.


alt, title, and longdesc provide basic, intermediate, and advanced 
information about a graphic.

1. alt tells you the function or purpose of the graphic-- *essential* 
information.

2. title tells you more about the graphic-- nice-to-know or 
explanatory information.

3. longdesc tells you everything you ever wanted to know about the 
graphic-- thorough, encyclopedic information.



There.

Writing things this way (yes, we can and will rewrite, but you get my 
drift) lets people immediately *get what we're talking about*. You 
don't even need to give them examples here. Even if these were 
authors' only instructions, they would still get things right most of 
the time.

This, at least, is my theory.
-- 
   Joe Clark | joeclark@joeclark.org | <http://joeclark.org/access/>
   Accessibility articles, resources, and critiques

Received on Wednesday, 5 December 2001 17:26:46 UTC