I think that what constitutes your target group really depends on what
you are trying to measure with the test of your web page/site.
If it's to test out the success of the sites conversion etc, then yeah,
you are right, and the clients generally aren't the best judges
(although, you'd have a hell of job telling them that!). However, as
with this example, when testing out the accessibility/usability of a
site, then I would test it out with as bigger cross section of
experience/disabilities are you are able, so I think your paralegal's
comments can be considered a valid concern (for an inexperienced and
able bodied person).
For this particular concern though, the alt attribute is not the cause
for concern here (unless she's using a very VERY old Netscape browser).
Those "little yellow boxes" should be your title text, not the alt text.
So yeah, at least for FF users, you should try and keep this quite small
(as FF has quite short limit before cutting off the text, while IE is
much more relaxed, and can do multi lines of comments).
If you really are still concerned for size of the alt text though, then
keep in mind that JAWS appears to have a limit of around 150 characters
(although im yet to test this), therefore I would try and stay below
this number. As a general rule though, be as succinct as possible,
without losing intended meaning. The 90 or so characters that you raised
earlier (or should I say I described earlier) should be perfectly fine
for alt text with regards to its length.
I think that for textual descriptions, the title and the alt should be
more than enough for your needs, as you so rightly said yourself, steer
clear of longdesc for its lack of support (plus I feel a longdesc would
be overkill).
Cheers,
David.
John S. Britsios wrote:
OK everybody. Now back to reality.
He is a real world testing scenario:
I asked a novice/intermediate(?) Internet user without any known
disabilities to test a demo page I have created for that purpose (with
graphics rendered as background in CSS), and therefore no alt text
attributes available, and her first question was: "What do those symbols
mean?" .
And she continued: John, and why when I go over the graphics, those
little yellow boxes don't appear? I saw that often on other pages, were
they explain what the graphics are about.
To this point, I wanted to add here, that not only experienced users are
welcome to request any of our services. While to be specific, our tester
was a paralegal secretary, and she have requested our services a while
ago, for building a web site for the lawyers company she is working
with. So I think I cannot consider such employees for example,
non-targeted group, or?
So, far I still think it would be appropriate to modify the alt
attributes as in previous mails suggested, but for a long description
(not longdesc though), I am still not sure about that.
What do you think now?
Thanks again for your kind feedbacks.
Best,
John
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