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Posted by Jukka K. Korpela on 06/01/07 09:51
Scripsit Lsimmons5:
> On Jun 1, 8:47 am, cwdjrxyz <spamtr...@cwdjr.info> wrote:
You should quote (or paraphrase) only the relevant part of the message that
you are commenting on. In this case, that message contained nothing
relevant, so perhaps you should have sent a followup to some other message.
> I can now see the function of the ALT attribute -- but
> it seems to me that if you have a row of buttons linking to different
> pages on a website, then every button and gif/jpeg should have its own
> separate description (and that would be a very time consuming
> procedure).
They need different alt texts of course, since they contain (or at least
should) contain different texts in image format or otherwise different
symbols.
> www.pleaselookitup.com
It's hardly so time-consuming to type in the texts that you now have in the
images only. There's some extra work _now_, since it was not handled when
the images were created (and someone typed in the texts in the first place).
But the real culprit is the use of images for linking. If you used text
links, you would have typed in the text once, and that's it.
In fact, you could still upgrade to text links. The somewhat button-like
images that you use for linking could probably be quite reasonably
implemented as styled text links so that the appearance is similar if not
better. This would also solve the legibility problem - even though I can
_see_ the images, they are considerably more difficult to read than normal
text, and links _should_ be _easier_.
> It would appear from the comments received that W3C approval can still
> be obtained by simply choosing a non-descriptive ALT tag -- so what is
> the value of W3C approval in this instance? Or have I totally
> misunderstood the reasoning?
There's no "W3C approval". The W3C does not have any approval process for
web pages (except perhaps its internal quality control for its own pages,
and that control must be, er, not quite perfect). The HTML syntax rules make
the alt attribute mandatory, but they don't say anything meaningful about
its value. On the other hand, the prose of HTML specs and the W3C WAI
recommendations specify the meaning of alt attributes, so you would not
conform to W3C specifications (only the formalized syntax) if you throw in
alt attributes with useless or worse than useless values.
Besides, what would you need "W3C approval" for? But you need accessibility
(including useful alt attributes) in order to be accessible to all people.
--
Jukka K. Korpela ("Yucca")
http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/
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