David Dorward <do*****@yahoo. com> wrote:
When putting a picture with an alt-text to Internetexplore r, the
content of the ALT-Text is displayed when the mouse is moving over
the picture.
Some people consider this a bug, some people consider this an
accessibility feature, some people consider it a bug that happens to
provide accessibility benefits.
In this particular case, where the image consists of text in a particular
shape, I tend to agree with third opinion.
I recently visited a site in Rumanian and noticed that although I could
understand much of the content, the navigational links were very
difficult since they were text as images in a very decorative font.
Switching images off _might_ help if the pages are well-designed,
but it gets clumsy on many browsers, especially I would have to switch
off _all_ images. So I would really have appreciated tooltips that show
the text in a normal font.
Even images that contain text in a fairly normal font may cause problems
e.g. due to lack of sufficient color contrast - and what's sufficient
depends on the user and the browsing situation.
I wonder if authors should really use both the alt attribute and the
title attribute, with identical content, for images that are used to
achieve particular visual rendering of some text. For example,
<img src="facilitati .jpg" alt="Facilitati " title="Facilita ti">
The best approach, when feasible, is to use just text and apply CSS to
suggest particular visual rendering of the characters. (The problem still
remains that a user probably cannot switch off those suggestions without
switching off the page's styling as a whole.)
--
Yucca,
http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/
Pages about Web authoring:
http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/www.html