Re: ALT tag limitation

There is no specific character length limitation for alt text as far as
WCAG 2.0 is concerned.

We have heard anecdotally that some user agents impose character limits,
that is, they truncate alt text longer than a given length. However,
what the character length before truncation and which user agents do
this is not something we have collected data on.

This would become a question of accessibility support. If user agents
that your users use truncate alt text, that would be an issue for the
use of alt. You can determine this is by testing. We haven't done such
testing ourselves. We may in the future but it's a pretty indefinite
time frame.

Michael

rodrigo januário da silva januário wrote:
> Hello Shawn,
>
> Thank you so much for your response. This char limitations is really a
> concern for me. Let's wait for Michael's advice.
>
> Best regards,
> Rodrigo.
>
> 2009/7/24 Shawn Henry <shawn@w3.org <mailto:shawn@w3.org>>
>
>     Hi Rodrigo,
>
>     I do not know of a specific character limit of alt in WCAG 2.0.
>
>     I'm CCing Michael Cooper, WCAG 2.0 editor, in case he does.
>
>     Best,
>     ~Shawn
>
>
>
>     -----
>     Shawn Lawton Henry
>     W3C Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI)
>     e-mail: shawn@w3.org <mailto:shawn@w3.org>
>     phone: +1.617.395.7664
>     about: http://www.w3.org/People/Shawn/
>
>
>
>
>
>     rodrigo januário da silva januário wrote:
>
>         Greetings W3C team,
>
>          
>         I am working on accessibility and I would like to solve a
>         minor question about WCAG 2.0. I am doing a deep investigation
>         on screen readers and I have contacted my peer in Freedom
>         Scientific for JAWS questions and he told me W3C recommends
>         ALT text shorten than 255 chars. However, my peer does not
>         have the exact location of the information in the WC3's site.
>         I also have done a search in WCAG pages and didn't find
>         anything about this limitation.
>
>          
>         I know alt tag should be as brief as possible, but I would
>         like to know how many chars would be considered as a violation
>         for WCAG 2.0. Would you mind to help me on this?
>
>          
>         Thanks in advanced,
>
>          
>         Best regards,
>
>         Rodrigo.
>
>

-- 

Michael Cooper
Web Accessibility Specialist
World Wide Web Consortium, Web Accessibility Initiative
E-mail cooper@w3.org <mailto:cooper@w3.org>
Information Page <http://www.w3.org/People/cooper/>