Re: ALT as required attribute

Terry,

Alt text is a type of meta information, it is text related to an image.

This information could be useful to:
people with impaired vision, using a screen reader
or those using a browser that does not display images,
or people on a low bandwidth connection.

also the browsers you mention display a tooltip when the user mouses 
over the image, (and in the future may do so when they have focus, for 
instance if tabbed to using a keyboard.)
This can be very helpful if one is not clear about the purpose of an 
image.

anyway that gives you an idea of the type of reasons alt tags are worth 
writing.

thanks

Jonathan
http://www.peepo.com

On Monday, February 3, 2003, at 05:15 PM, Terry Thompson wrote:

>
> I'm trying to grasp the implications of ALT being a required attribute
> in various if not all DTD's of both HTML and XHTML.
>
> If I load the following code in Netscape 7, IE 6, Opera 6.01, or Amaya
> 7.2, each of these browsers is forgiving of my having omitted an ALT
> attribute from my IMG element. This same code doesn't validate, but why
> should I be concerned about validation, if so many user agents 
> seemingly
> aren't enforcing the requirement?
>
> <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
> <!DOCTYPE html
>      PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN"
>      "DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">
> <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="en" lang="en">
>   <head>
>     <title>No ALT Example</title>
>   </head>
>   <body>
>     <h1>The following image has no ALT:</h1>
>      <img src="something.jpg" />
>   </body>
> </html>
>
>
> Thanks for any clarification!
>
> Terry Thompson
> AccessIT/DO-IT
> The University of Washington
> Email: tft@u.washington.edu
> Voice: 206-221-4168
> TTY: 206-685-3648
> Fax: 206-221-4171
> www.washington.edu/accessit
> www.washington.edu/doit
>

Received on Monday, 3 February 2003 13:30:42 UTC