HI all

would first of all like to thank all the people who have responded so
swiftly to my request, both on and off line.

To answer this one is that the descriptions are long enough to create a box
that pops up and flags the attention to the visual user. The text in the alt
tag explains dimensions and measurements that are illustrated in the diagram
together with the context in which they are in. They do not add any more
content than the visual diagram. I do take the point that alt text does not
pop up in other browsers.

Having thought about it more I am going to go for shorter alt text on the
diagrams that tells the fact that there is a D link to another page with the
full description.

cheers
marcus

-----Original Message-----
From: * EASI: Equal Access to Software & Information
[mailto:[log in to unmask]]On Behalf Of Kerri Hicks
Sent: 11 February 2003 17:25
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Alt Text is a tooltip


Which begs the question...if your sighted users are so interested in the
text, why is it in an "alt" attribute? Why not make it a caption of the
image?

Also, alt text does not pop up in many browsers...mainly only recent
versions of IE for Windows. Not Mac, not most versions of
Netscape/Mozilla, etc. So if it's that interesting and important, you
might want to think about making the text an integral part of the page.

Just my $0.02.

John Gardner wrote:
> As a screen reader user I do not like long Alt tags.  Alt tags appear
> in-line and have to be read through whether you want to or not.  Often,
> especially when skimming, you simply do not want details about what a
> diagram is.  It is a much better practice to use D links in such
> cases.  These are links to long descriptions that any user can pop up for
a
> description.  Although HTML supports a longdesc tag that is supposed to do
> the same thing, it is not currently supported by mainstream browsers.