Advice needed describing/labling images to blind users

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I want to be able to have worded descriptions linked to images on my website so blind users and those that surf with images turned off can get an idea of what the image is about.

I use Dreamweaver Ultra Dev. I could try naked HTML if informed of the correct code.

Can anyone advise please?

www.bearsac.com

I guess you can set an the ALT-Attribute even in Dreamweaver. ie: <img src="$filename" alt="$description">

http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/html/alt.html#harmful

check out the links after

The best way to test your page for accessibility is to get the main text reading browsers used by visually impaired people try it out. Some annotations actually disrupt the flow of useful information.

Bearsac-Debra nice site, although you can make some improments. I would start by getting it passed validation. At the moment it doesn't have a Document Type so it can't really be validated. You are in that 'quirks mode' grey area which is never a good place.

http://validator.w3.org/check?verbose=1 ... Findex.htm

Just slowly work your way through, making corrections a couple at a time, and rechecking. Conformity doesn't mean accessibility far from it. But it can, for the simplest things, work as a sort of damage limitation from displaying completely differently in a particular browser.

I suggest using html (strict) rather then xhtml for you purposes because of problems with the standardisation of area maps between versions of xhtml. W3C are not perfect they do make mistakes and this is one area they cocked up, which caused some inconsistency between some browsers.

Now for your design, you are using area maps to navigate. So for accessibility within the area tag use the alt attribute. So the main image itself is decoration so you could use alt="" for the image and then put descriptions for the areas. If that makes sense.

Thanking people for their help. I have described some of the photos in diary 08 and meets celebrities page so far. I will look at websites and other suggestions as time permits.

Any other advice also welcome.

have a good day folks.

Debra

As others hae said, the correct way to make your page "say" what an image is, is with the "alt" attribute.

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I find the WebDeveloper extension in Firefox and SeaMonkey (and other Mozilla-baser browsers?) to be indispensable for checking websites.

It gives a huge range of ways to see exactly what's going on in a page.

The primary ones that would be of interest to you are in the "Tools" dropdown. There, you can easily send your page to the W3C validator, for (X)HTML, and also for CSS, plus others, including the accessibility checks at HiSoftware® Cynthia Says™.

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I also use the offline "tidy" program to clean up messy (X)HTML. (And to convert plain HTML to HTML+CSS or XHTML+CSS.)

I've not extensively used it, but KompoZer is a nice, free editor. It is started life as the editor I get, built in, in Seamonkey.

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As mentioned earlier, by 0_equals_true, because you don't have a DOCTYPE, the validator complains of 25 errors and 4 warnings on your front page. As some of these are due to it guessing at "HTML 4.01 Transitional", then disliking some XHTML constructs that have found their way into a ".html" file, I tried forcing "XHTML 1.0 Transitional". However, it then gave 290 Errors and 4 warnings, so I guess that wasn't such a good idea!

Note: when an element supports an alt attribute and a title attribute (check standards). It is the alt that is used for accessibility. The title is used often as a tooltip, when the cursor is over that rendered element for a while. title is always optional alt should be supplied even if it is an empty string.