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.