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
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07739 287392
[+44] 01273 277396

133 Cuckmere Way, Brighton, BN1 8GH

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