Best accessible practice for adding textual images

Hello,

I am a front end developer and using CSS with XHTML  to position my
content. I am curios to know what is the best way to display images
containing text.

Lately I have been using the CSS background property to display all my
images and hiding the text in a span. For example the following site:
http://www.caweek.org. Obviously, you can't resize the images on your
screen, but If you turn off styles you will have a pure text document
in your browser, apart from the occasional photograph.

I have just discovered another method by where you add the image as
HTML, but specify the height and width using css and making it an EM
instead of PX. This enables the user to enlarge the image as they
would enlarge text. This of course pixelates the image as you enlarge
it, leaving an unsatisfactory but readable result. Also, if you turn
styles off you still have the image displaying on the screen and you
can't enlarge it.

My question is what would the W3C say is best practice and the common
method for people with sight difficulties to read a web page? Would
they turn the styles off when they can't enlarge the image? Or would
they prefer to see a blurred version when they enlarge the text?

Any advice would be fantastic.
Thanks in advance.
Paul Collins

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Paul Collins
Ph: +44 (0) 793 9038 249 (UK)
pauldcollins@gmail.com

Received on Friday, 20 May 2005 08:27:26 UTC