RE: Screen readers and images

> all I get is mypicture.jpg

I threw together a test page with a series of images, and JAWS consistently
read the whole URI (e.g. images\mypicture.jpg). After I got your message, I
double checked against some live pages and got what you did, just the image
file name (e.g. mypicture.jpg).

After quite a bit of head scratching, I realized I made a simple mistake on
my test: I used a backslash instead of a forward slash in the URI
("images\mypicture.jpg" instead of "images/mypicture.jpg"). Since I was
running off my local drive, IE5 interpreted the "\" the same as it would a
"/", but, interestingly, JAWS didn't. They must be reading the whole URI,
parsing it, and reading what ever is after the last "/", if it exists.

Thanks for catching it. I'll send a correction to the list.

Mike

-----Original Message-----
From: David Poehlman [mailto:poehlman1@home.com]
Sent: Friday, February 09, 2001 6:34 PM
To: Mike Scott
Subject: Re: Screen readers and images

all I get is mypicture.jpg

----- Original Message -----
From: "Mike Scott" <mscott@msfw.com>
To: "WAI Interest Group" <w3c-wai-ig@w3.org>
Sent: February 09, 2001 6:06 PM
Subject: RE: Screen readers and images

The default behavior in JAWS (3.7) is to read "graphic, [alt text]" if
the
alt tag is set, and completely ignore the image if the alt tag is not
present (or alt="").

There is a user setting for "Graphic Verbosity" that can be set to
"All
Graphics" (the default setting is "Tagged Images"). Set to "All
Graphics",
JAWS will read the URI of the image if it has no alt text. For
example, JAWS
might read "graphic, images/mypicture.jpg".

IBM Home Page Reader 3 has the same default behavior as JAWS (except
that it
doesn't say the word "graphic" ahead of the alt text). If the user
checks
the setting: "Annonuce images with no alt text", HPR will read "image
with
no alt text" followed by the uri (e.g. "images/mypicture.jpg") for
images
without alt text.


-----Original Message-----
From: w3c-wai-ig-request@w3.org [mailto:w3c-wai-ig-request@w3.org]On
Behalf Of Jeff Isom
Sent: Thursday, February 08, 2001 7:59 PM
To: w3c-wai-ig@w3.org
Subject: Screen readers and images

Can anyone explain to me how screen readers handle images?  I was
under the
impression that if an image doesn't have an alt tag, the screen reader
would
read a file name or something similar.  Is this correct, or does the
screen
reader simply skip the image as if it were not there.

Thanks,
Jeff Isom

Received on Tuesday, 13 February 2001 09:53:18 UTC