Accessibility and the alt tag

[darkemeralds]

I'm trying to make my posts more accessible, and since I post a lot of illustrative pictures, I thought it would be a good practice to include a description with each one, but I find that I need some help.

My reading suggests that putting descriptive information in the alt portion of the img tag makes that description available to text-reading browsers, but I can't figure out how to test it, since I don't have text-reading capabilities.

Any suggestions? Can anyone verify that the alt text on the picture immediately following this sentence is accessible to a text-reader?

Comments

[kis]

I'm getting the same result here: can't see the titles on this one but can on the mudroom ones.

[darkemeralds]

I've discovered that Internet Explorer displays the Alt text when you hover, but that that's not W3 compliant. The text that's supposed to display when hovering is what's in the Title attribute.

The Alt attribute is specifically designed to appear when images don't load, and therefore to be visible/audible to a) low-bandwidth connections, b) browsers with text-reader functionality, and b) web crawlers.

The Title attribute is supposed to serve the hover function for fully-sighted users, but I'm not sure if text-readers read it.

Interesting little journey into W3 land.

[sporky_rat]

I can't even get the alt text when I hover over the image.

[darkemeralds]

No, me neither, and apparently that's W3 compliant. "All other browsers[except Internet Explorer] are following the specification, and will only display the alt text if the image cannot be displayed."

The hover function is supposed to be served by the Title attribute. I can't see that the Title attribute is of any use to visually-impaired users or their text-readers, but I'm also noticing that Chrome for Linux isn't behaving in a fully W3-compliant way in either the Alt case or the Title case.

Flickr automatically fills both attributes in the HTML it creates for your photos, and depending on how/whether you title your photos, the two attributes can be very similar, so it took some fiddling to figure out which one I was seeing when I hovered. It was the Title attribute, and when I removed the content of it, nothing showed up in hover.

[bluemeridian]

I've been trying to do the same but it can be damned difficult!

[darkemeralds]

Oh good, it's not just me, then. I'm going to keep chipping away at it.