Accessibility

Unfortunately, for many people, reading or surfing the Internet is not an easy thing to do. People with handicaps, such as the blind, rely on screen readers to read our web pages. Making our web sites accessible to those with disabilities is an important aspect of building a quality web site. Besides, it's the right thing to do.

Two popular screen reader programs are JAWS for Windows and Window-Eyes.

The purpose of Alt tags

People with limited sight sometimes can't see the images that we have on our site and screen readers only reads the text aloud or send it to a Braille display. Screen readers are not capable of interpreting an image, so, it's up to us to describe them as accurately as possible.

The Alt="" tag is the short form of an image description and is required in xhtml. The Alt tag should be kept fairly short. The reason for this is that browsers will cut the Alt tag description off. In my experience, browsers will only display about 10 words of an Alt tag.

The long description

The description of an image should be as accurate and descriptive as possible and for that reason we should All use the Longdesc="" tag. The long description tag is an html file and is linked from the < img src="" code>.

I suggest that you create a file and name it "longdesc" and place it inside your image directory. Create a description for each of your images. Name it the same as your image just change the file extension to html and store them inside the longdesc file. For example, I created a description for the image "boots.jpg". I changed the file extension from jpg to html and saved it as "boots.html" in my longdesc file.

This is an example of an image formatted for accessibility.
<img src="images/boots.jpg" Alt="a pair of old work boots" Longdesc="images/longdesc/boots.html" height="60" width="120" />

Writing an image description

Writing a description of an image is not as simple as it sounds. If you don't believe me, try it. The description is intended to convey the image (a mental picture) through words. You can't just write "a pair of boots". That could be a pair of women's boots, men's boots, cowboy boots, work boots, green boots, black boots, knee high boots and so on. Remember, you're writing this for someone who can't see. Keep that in mind as you write the description.

This will challenge your powers of observation. Here is a description I wrote for the boots image. It's not great, it's not even good. But, it's better than just writing "a pair of boots".