"Stay in your house!"
Or, you know, get out there and do your thing. . . .
Image description: A beautiful color photo of a blue-skied day off the coast of Alaska. Picture is taken from the upper deck of a cruise ship in a fjord, the white-capped mountains in the background and the water a vivid shade of aqua. The length of the ship can be seen in the middle-ground, and in the foreground by the railing of this upper deck are a couple in the shade of a bulky apparatus on the deck. One sits in a manual wheelchair, and they both look at the incredible view we see. Flickr photo credit to Todd Sheridan, tud5000.
Image description: A colorful photo from the 2007 Toronto Pride parade of a middle-aged white guy wearing just sneakers, shorts, a baseball cap and carnival beads as he rides a red four-wheeled electric scooter that is decked out in rainbow fabric and rainbow flowers. There's a large beach umbrella above him covered in the rainbow fabric, as is the front and back baskets of his scooter. Everything is trimmed with flowers in colors of the rainbow. The crowd watching the parade lines the street in the background. Flickr photo credit to hypersapiens.
Image description: Two women sit in power wheelchairs at the edge of a lake holding fishing rods. The sun is shining, the water is a vivid blue and there are trees lining the water's edge in the distance. Flickr photo credit to Karva Javi.
Request for technical help: I may have asked this before some time ago, but while I look back for that discussion, can anyone tell me how to use alt tags for photos in Firefox? I've tagged the first two of these three pics, but it only shows up using the Explorer browser. It doesn't show at all in Firefox. Any expertise appreciated.
9 comments:
The alt attribute works in Firefox as it was meant to, i.e. when the image does not load, the alternate text will show up instead (as a test, turn off images in Firefox and you will see the text of the alt attribute in its place). Unlike Internet Explorer, alt attributes in Firefox do not show up as a tooltip (mouse-over text).
Some people use the title attribute (title="blablabla") in addition to the alt attribute for tooltips for images. However, the title attribute is really meant to provide additional information that is not essential. A good use for the title attribute is to add descriptive text to links, like if the link text itself does not clearly describe the link's destination. But it is important to remember that screen reader users do not always have the title attribute functionality turned on so they may not get the information that is provided by the title attribute.
Hope this helps.
Welcome back - please forgive my belated greeting! These are great photos - I particularly like the fishing one which is a simple image but powerful.
Yes--welcome back, Kay.
I just got back from Dragon*Con, which had just oodles of PWDs in costumes that 'matched' their disabilities, particularly a couple of the horror-based ones! :D (Of course, amputees do that best.) Wish I had some photos, but no digital camera, which I hope to remedy soon.
To paraphrase Bullwinkle, next year for sure!
Thanks, Zara.
Daisy, I have no idea what Dragon*Con is, but there are some cool pictures from it already on Flickr. Unfortunately, they are uncopyable so I couldn't share them here myself.
Daisy, I have no idea what Dragon*Con is, but there are some cool pictures from it already on Flickr. Unfortunately, they are uncopyable so I couldn't share them here myself.
Kay, I blogged about it here. I went through hundreds of pics to find me some copyable henchmen, and you might be able to find some good PWD photos from DragonCon!
One guy had his whole arm chopped, off, and was walking around the convention, none the worse for wear! Really, I saw him! :D
Love the pics.
Great Pics.
To follow up on Zara's excellent explanation, there are several attributes for images that assist in accessibility:
alt: required for xhtml and html 4. Used as alternate text when the image is not loaded
title: "offers advisory information about the element for which it is set". Many browsers use a tooltip to display titles, but that's not required by the standard.
longdesc: this is what you really want. The long description can be really, really long. It's actually a separate file that's loaded when the user calls it up (by right-clicking in mozilla & netscape).
For massively more information on this topic, read Joe Clark's chapter on images from Building Accessible Websites. It's at The image problem.
Thanks, Katja! My understanding has been that longdesc is so poorly supported that using it isn't as effective as... something else. But I need to browse that link thoroughly. If I have further comments or questions I'll start a new post for them because I really want to get this down in my head. I've been winging it with html for too long!
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