Posted by GreyWyvern on 08/18/05 01:24

Charles Sweeney <me@charlessweeney.com> wrote:

> I disagree. The alt text should describe the picture. If the image is
> a logo, I want to know it's a logo.

Yesh, that is what the "title" attribute is for. The obvious alt text for
a logo would be the name of the company/organization it represents. This
is the *function* of alt text, it's not up for debate. The fact that
current browsers *cough*MSIE*cough* mishandle it by treating it the same
as a "title" attribute will not be the case forever.

> When I first went online, due to a very slow modem I always surfed with
> images switched off (same even today using a mobile phone as a modem).
> A good description of the image made sense to me, and helped me
> understand what the page was about.

Good alt text should do that for photographs.

> Tell me this, if the picture is of a man getting presented with a
> cheque, what alt text would you use? I would use something like
> "Picture of Mr A receiving a cheque from Mr B". What's wrong with that?

That's not bad alt text, for a photograph. Alternatively, you could use
the longdesc attribute to link to a URI with a more detailed description
of the image. However, longdesc is not really widely supported yet,
despite being part of the HTML 4.01 spec.

>> Also, setting alt text to "" is not just to get the page to validate
>> but rather to say to the user-agent that if the image cannot or is not
>> displayed then the suitable alt text is "", ie. the image has no
>> meaning other than as eye-candy and can be safely ignored by the user.
>
> I wouldn't use the alt attribute in such a case. If you must use it,
> then "meaningless image" would be better.

Huh? So if someone is surfing your website with images off, you'd rather
see this:

+-----------------+ +-----------------+
|meaningless image|Welcome to my website!|meaningless image|
+-----------------+ +-----------------+

.... than this:

Welcome to my website!

???

Whatever floats your boat, I guess.

>> If no
>> alt text was given, however, the user-agent may choose to display the
>> word "image" or even "image.ext", which is less than helpful and may
>> lead the user to think that the image was actual content, or worse
>> still it would litter the page with the word "image" making it
>> difficult to read.
>
> In which case they should get a better user agent. If the picture
> cannot be displayed, and there is no alt text, the agent should ignore
> it.

Just like you "want to know it's a logo", I'd like to know if there were
any images supposed to be on the site which didn't load. This is
especially good while developing. Thus I am happy that Opera replaces
broken images with:

+-----+
|Image|
+-----+

.... rather than hiding them against my wishes. If I feel that the image
is not worth even this bit of display, I can give it alt="" which allows
the browser to assume with confidence that the image is not worth a
textual representation of any kind.

Grey

--
The technical axiom that nothing is impossible sinisterly implies the
pitfall corollary that nothing is ridiculous.
- http://www.greywyvern.com/webslavent?msg=149 - Presto the Puffin!

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