The alt text appears as a tooltip. Tooltips are controlled globally; they are not browser-specific. Tooltips are exposed by hovering the mouse over objects, such as the Start button and System tray icons. 

You can adjust the appearance of tooltips, including font, font size, background colour, text colour, etc. in the Appearance tab of the Display applet in the Control Panel, but I know no way to adjust how long the tooltip shows before blinking out of existence. Perhaps there is a registry hack to change this...

You might try making tooltips more conspicuous. The default font is almost illegible. I set tooltips to 12 point boldface, rather than 8 point skinny. Because they are more obvious, I read them faster. (It takes time to crane one's neck and squint at the screen!) 

However, if people are commenting favourably about the alt text, have you considered incorporating the text into the web pages as regular content?

Alan

Alan Cantor
Project Manager
Strategic e-Government Implementation
e-Government, OCCS
416-212-1152
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>>> "Marcus Ormerod" <[log in to unmask]> 02/11/03 03:17am >>>
Hi all


sorry to ask what might be an unsolvable question. I am creating a large
website with many diagrams. The diagrams have complete text descriptions as
alt tags. Visually the alt text appears only briefly on screen and I know
that screen reading software will read the entire content, however, a few
people who are involved in the development of the site have commented that
visually they would like to be able to read the content before it
disappears. Has anyone found a way to stop the visual aspect of alt text
disappearing too quickly? I assume it is controlled by the browser software,
but I cannot find a button in internet explorer that controls this feature.

regards
marcus