Alternative Text on Mac Web-browsers

[Nerdy Keith]

Hi guys,

I'm doing a web design course at the present. An obvious part of this course is designing websites. Now many web-desiners happen to agree that the Macs are indeed the best computers for design for many reasons, but I've come across an issue I wanted to address.


On my Web Design course, we do a lot of our web design on Adobe Dreamweaver (for html and css). It has been stressed to us that "alternative text" in images on any website is very important and should never be left out of any well designed sight.

We have discovered that a lot of websites on mac browsers do not show alternative tex. If you are not familiar with that term, here is an scree-cap of what I mean:

As you can see when you mouse over an image with alternative text a small toolbox appears with a brief description or title. It seems that it is mostly Yahoo websites that have the viewable alternative text on mac browsers. According to my tutor, most websites on Windows browsers display alternative text and this may be an issue with mac browsers.

Now there is a way around this for designing my own sites for the alternative text to be viewable in mac browsers. It seems that in order for it to be possible an extra filed must be added into the html code for the alternative text so it is viewable on a mac which is a title filed as well as an alternative text field.

If you actually go in and check out the html codes on certain websites you will see that the alternative text is set up on html but it is without the title filed and thus it is not viewable on the mac browsers.

Does anyone know why this is exactly?

 

[cw2k7]

The alt text tag is for when the image is missing, a text browser or a screen reader is used. It is good that you are being taught that it is important to always include as a lot of web designers don't bother and this is incredibly annoying for visually impaired users. It is not meant to be shown on mouse over but some browsers do.

The title tag is what is meant to be used for mouse over text.

If you are using single pixel images for spacing etc don't add add alt text or titles to them. I have seen some sites use hundreds of them and set alt text=".", kind of annoying if you use a screen reader and you have to listen to the word fullstop loads of time before the main text.