Re: Failure F3 -images via CSS: a question

Sailesh Panchang wrote:
> Failure F3 says it is not ok to  render images that are essential to understand content via CSS. Agreed. 
> Consider: a text link with a CSS background image, say for document type PDF or  Word. 
> The author uses offscreen text as part of anchor text to convey this document type and also does so via the title attribute on anchor. Is it ok then to use background image ?
>   
As a rule of thumb - any time you are thinking of using off-screen text 
and a background image, you should be using an alt attribute on a 
content image.

> Again if CSS is turned off or user-CSS is used,  the offscreen text will be available to all.
But not if CSS is turned on and images are turned off.

HTML has a perfectly good method of including images that convey 
information. Reserve background images for presentational details. 
Trying to use backgrounds as content while duplicating that content in 
the document and hiding it with CSS is complicated, usually leaves holes 
where it fails, and isn't necessary.

Received on Monday, 22 June 2009 22:11:00 UTC