- From: Jukka K. Korpela <jkorpela@cs.tut.fi>
- Date: Fri, 7 Feb 2003 21:32:24 +0200 (EET)
- To: w3c-wai-ig@w3.org
On Fri, 7 Feb 2003, Doug McCrae wrote: > What would be the appropriate alt for the two grey horizontal bars on > the page http://www.gla.ac.uk/adulteducation/ ? For the first, alt="". For the second, alt= "End of page content proper. Contact information follows." If we only cared about visual presentation when images are not displayed, a string of underlines or hyphens would do fine, since it would simulate the bars. But in speech or Braille presentation, that would be awful. And we should think more about those people who must use non-visual browsers than people who just turn off images for convenience. Contrary to what some comments have said, the bars are not purely decorative but relevant dividers. For the first one, alt="" is suitable since there's no reason to add stuff that makes it even slower to get to actual content (in e.g. speech presentation). But the second one acts as an important signal in graphic display, and a functionally equivalent signal should be given. On the other hand, using <hr> would be somewhat more logical, though I don't know how many speech browsers actually apply the suggestion (in HTML specs) of rendering <hr> as a pause. Yet another possibility is to use a style sheet to suggest a border, as mentioned in the discussion. I have been a proponent of that approach, but in fact it has the drawback that the essential division of the document into parts is not indicated in a reliable manner. On the other hand, the approach could be combined with the use of <hr>. Some related notes, including an example of combining CSS and <hr>: http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/html/alt.html#hr -- Jukka "Yucca" Korpela, http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/
Received on Friday, 7 February 2003 14:32:27 UTC