Jon,
this is useful (and somehow quite amusing)...
http://browsers.evolt.org/
You'll find IE 1 there :-)
Best, Cristiano
On 18 Aug 2009, at 12:53, Jon Pratty wrote:
> Phil
>
> I'd tried that - couldn't find an old version of IE to install.
> Funny, isn't
> it, there's probably several billion AOL discs with old versions of
> IE on,
> but we've landfilled them all...
>
> JP
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Museums Computer Group [mailto:[log in to unmask]]On Behalf Of
> Phil Blume
> Sent: 18 August 2009 12:37
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: Re: Accessibility: where do we stand on alt tag use?
>
>
> Jon
>
> Why not simply keep an older version of IE on your machine for
> mousing over
> the pictures and checking the alt tags?
>
> Phil
>
> 2009/8/18 Jon Pratty <[log in to unmask]>
>
>> Re Accessibility and alts
>>
>> As Christiano says - well done Frankie, for a great summary of the
>> current
>> position. Re Frankie's comments about whether anyone actually
>> employs this
>> best practice: just look at www.Culture24.org.uk and you'll see the
>> site
>> has
>> been doing just this for at least the last five or six years...but
>> whether
>> your borwser will show you the alts is another matter.
>>
>> However, I'd like to open out the points made a bit. Fortuitously,
>> Frankie's
>> writings have helped me focus more closely on what I was mithering
>> about,
>> and perhaps someone can help.
>>
>> Inheriting a large corpus of legacy content (at
>> www.disabilityartsonline.org.uk) in a new site means I have to
>> audit and
>> check the old content is cool when it comes to good access
>> practice. When
>> it
>> comes to larger websites, the easiest way to check through used to
>> be a
>> page-by-page scan through the live content for good titling, text
> chunking,
>> link titling, a quick gander at the keywording, image file titling
>> and
> then
>> a quick check of the alts using IE and mousing over the pics.
>>
>> Well - since IE 8 (and of course Firefox anyway) I can't now whiz
>> through
>> and check alts like that. That's a real nuisance - now it means
>> going into
>> each record one by one through the CMS and opening out all the text
>> fields
>> to check to see if there's alt text nestling in there. Darn! We've
>> got at
>> least 300-400 old bits of content to work through. That's bad. SO -
>> *can
>> anyone tell me how to make either IE, Firefox or Safari show alts by
>> default?*
>>
>> Beyond my current requirement - Frankie's great response opens the
>> door to
>> a
>> few queries:
>>
>> 1. Many (perhaps the majority of) vision-impaired users aren't
>> totally
>> blind
>> and read alts and image captions together. That’s why there needs
>> to be
>> some
>> relationship between the caption of the pic and the alt. So the
>> visible
>> caption can be nice and descriptive, and the alt can be similarly
>> useful,
>> and supporting in terms of meaning and function, but they definitely
>> shouldn't repeat all info from one to the other.
>>
>> 2. Image re-use within a CMS is also important to consider. Frankie
> briefly
>> mentions this - but it's really important. In busier sites pictures
>> are
>> often re-used, where copyright allows. So *both* caption and alt
>> need to
> be
>> 'transportable' within the CMS. The caption needs to have the right
>> copyright attribution, and the alt needs to be focussed on the
>> meaning of
>> the image *wherever* it's used on the site, not just in the first use
>> context.
>>
>> 3. Beyond good accessiblity practice, alts are very friendly to
>> Google and
>> dropping keywords into them (very sparingly) will bump up your Google
> Image
>> search visits. But that's probably another list subject!
>>
>> Looking around at recent debates about public service digital content
> (have
>> a look at the Digital Britain report, and the Arts Council's recent
> content
>> survey) I think it’s clear we all need to be much more switched on
>> about
>> alt
>> text – it’s actually not difficult to write good text that really
>> helps
>> vision impaired users to enjoy the content, in combination with photo
>> captions. If the alt was well written in the first place, it’ll do
>> its job
>> again and again.
>>
>>
>>
>> Jon Pratty
>>
>> Publisher: Disability Arts Online
>> Digital publishing consultant: culture sector
>> Journalist: arts, technology and society
>>
>> Twitter/jon_pratty
>> www.disabilityartsonline.org.uk
>> http://machineculture.wordpress.com
>> [log in to unmask]
>>
>> 07739 287392
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>>
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