IE shows alt-text as kind of a mouse-over

[peter pilsl]

When putting a picture with an alt-text to Internetexplorer, the content
of the ALT-Text is displayed when the mouse is moving over the picture.

This is not what I expected. The ALT-text should appear when the images
cannot be displayed but IE displays both. All other browers (firefox,
konqueror, safari ...) do well. This gets especially annoying if the
picture is actually displaying a text and the alt-text is the same text
and you see the same text twice.

Is there any trick to change this IE-behaviour by setting a style or
something like this?

thnx,
peter


--
http://www2.goldfisch.at/know_list

[David Dorward]

peter pilsl wrote:

When putting a picture with an alt-text to Internetexplorer, 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.
Is there any trick to change this IE-behaviour by setting a style or
something like this?

IIRC, explicitly set a null title.

--
David Dorward <http://blog.dorward.me.uk/> <http://dorward.me.uk/>
Home is where the ~/.bashrc is

[Steve Pugh]

On Tue, 23 Nov 2004 22:06:40 +0100, peter pilsl <pi***@goldfisch.at>
wrote:

When putting a picture with an alt-text to Internetexplorer, the content
of the ALT-Text is displayed when the mouse is moving over the picture.
Netscape 4 also does this, but Netscape 6+ doesn't.
This is not what I expected. The ALT-text should appear when the images
cannot be displayed but IE displays both. All other browers (firefox,
konqueror, safari ...) do well. This gets especially annoying if the
picture is actually displaying a text and the alt-text is the same text
and you see the same text twice.
Would you believe that some people actually ask the creators of the
other browsers to put this 'feature' in?
Is there any trick to change this IE-behaviour by setting a style or
something like this?

title trumps alt in IE.
So <img alt="blah blah blah" title="foo"> will show foo in a tooltip
instead of blah blah blah. If you want no tooltip at all use title=""

Steve

[Jukka K. Korpela]

David Dorward <do*****@yahoo.com> wrote:

When putting a picture with an alt-text to Internetexplorer, 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="Facilitati">

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