Re: Alt is not a description (was Re: when to use longdesc for images)

Patrick and all,

I would like to suggest that non alt be abandoned, but I set html graphics 
to all in jaws simply because there are some situations in which I have 
found myself that I would not find stuff were it not rendered and 
labeled/tagged graphics are not sufficiently rendering of that information. 
I believe that jaws 5.0 or 5.1 fixed the asterisks issue.  I'll have to do 
some testing.

I'll have to investigate the letter thing, but basically, if you use alt="" 
or alt=" ", they are ignored.  I would think that in a valid world, jaws 
should ignore null alt no matter what you set the verbosity of html images 
to be.

Johnnie Apple Seed

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Patrick Lauke" <P.H.Lauke@salford.ac.uk>
To: <w3c-wai-ig@w3.org>
Sent: Tuesday, December 21, 2004 11:39 AM
Subject: RE: Alt is not a description (was Re: when to use longdesc for 
images)



> From: david poehlman

> I'm talking about setting jaws html graphics to all not
> visual graphics.  I
> have images suppressed in ie.

Ok, got the wrong end of the stick there before. So, basically
you've set JAWS to announce all graphics, not just the tagged
ones? I did a test with JAWS 4.02 set to announce all
graphics in HTML, and tried it on an image with an alt="***"
as you suggested before...but interestingly, JAWS ignores the alt
just the same way that it does alt="" or alt=" " in that particular
mode, and just announces the filename. Only once I actually put some
"normal" letter from the alphabet in the alt would it announce alt
rather than the filename.

In any case, it sounds like this is very dependent on user settings,
and I'd posit that users are at least partially responsible for setting up
their system in the way that works best for them. You consciously changed 
the
HTML options in Jaws (although I can't seem to replicate the effect that
you describe), which overrides any type of graceful hiding of purely
visual fluff images (which, unless I misunderstand you, is the effect that 
you
wanted to achieve in the first place). This does not, however, mean that
using a null alt is a practice that should be abandoned (if that was what
you were suggesting).

Patrick
________________________________
Patrick H. Lauke
Webmaster / University of Salford
http://www.salford.ac.uk

Received on Tuesday, 21 December 2004 16:54:57 UTC