
I guess “Where Has All The Alt Text Gone?” Would have been a more appropriate title for this post.
Nevertheless, can Somebody please give me a reason why Internet Explorer 8 is the only web browser that displays Alt Tags anymore? Maybe I’m out of the loop (or just too lazy to Google the problem). Are Alt Tags slowly becoming obsolete? According to the first Google definition I pulled, an Alt Tag is “A tag that provides alternative text for the visually impaired.” Now I may have missed the boat, but the last time I checked, visually impaired people still roam this planet. So why all of a sudden have browsers stopped supporting the Alt Tag? The pictures I’m using in this post are from the awesome Free Photoshop Tutorials website psdlounge.com. You can go there and you will see the graphic of the orange RSS dude. If you right click the image and go to “properties” you will see that the “Alternative Text” should say “Click here to subscribe”. So the Tag is there, and it’s proper, but for some reason it just doesn’t show up when you hover over the image in Firefox, or Google Chrome. I find this annoying. Does anybody else out there echo my frustrations? An explanation would be cool.










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The ALT tag is only meant to be used in the instance where an image can not be displayed, a-la text browsers or unsighted users using screen readers. IE does imporperly handle these by displaying a ToolTip. W3 has implemented a method for giving further description of an image when the image can properly be displayed, with the TITLE attribute. Using both will create the desired effect for both compliant browsers (Chrome, Firefox, Opera) and non-compliant browsers (IE).
Further reading: http://www.456bereastreet.com/archive/200412/the_alt_and_title_attributes/
Hey Hannah,
I appreciate the response. Thanks for that info!
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