RE: Alt Tags

Maybe a bit off topic, but I'll tell the story anyway: some time ago I was advising a designer on
how to make a specific site he was working on more accessible. He turned around and showed
me a page he had previously done...which was essentially an HTML page containing one giant
JPEG, full of text. He then proudly told me how all the text was stuffed in the ALT attribute.
I had to explain to him that, first of all, the entire ALT text was not structured. Bringing up the
page in Lynx showed everything as one big, long sentence. Section headings etc were
undistinguishable from normal text. Bullet points he had "faked" by using dashes and newlines
in the ALT simply displayed all inline. It was a complete mess. And yes, once I ran it through
JAWS, the screenreader stopped after about 60 characters or so.
The look on his face was priceless when he told me: "I thought accessibility was about making
sure all your images have ALT attributes..."

Right, apologies for the OT anecdote.

Patrick
p.s.: wir sehen uns wohl auf sitepointforums in ner weile ;) (redux)
________________________________
Patrick H. Lauke
Webmaster / University of Salford
http://www.salford.ac.uk 

-----Original Message-----
From: John Britsios [mailto:webmaster@webnauts.net]
Sent: 06 July 2003 18:18
To: W3C / WAI
Subject: Alt Tags


Can anyone tell, how many characters including spaces can an ALT tag have?

I heard max. 60, while JAWS can read only 60.

Do you have any info or better, resources for that?

Thanks for your support in advance,

John S. Britsios,
Web Accessibility and Usability Consultant


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Received on Monday, 7 July 2003 04:44:47 UTC