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]
>
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> [+44] 01273 277396
>
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>
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