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picture in
Figure 4.1
as part of a story, I used the
alt
text "30 White Ibis walking across the street in front of a
stop sign."
Figure 4.1. A content picture
Or perhaps you've embedded a PNG of the equation in a mathematical paper, like so:
The correct
alt
text for this would be "The definite integral of
x
squared between 1 and 2 is seven thirds."
However, many times the image is not really content. It is iconographic. In this case, choose your words so that
the meaning is conveyed rather than the description. For example, on many web sites you'll see something like
this:
<a href="slide67.html">
<img src="right_arrow.gif" width="100" height="50"/>
</a>
The correct
alt
text here is not "blue arrow facing right". Instead, it is simply the word
Next.
This conveys the
meaning of the image better than a description could.
Finally, many images are simply decorations with no real content at all. These should have empty
alt
attributes. That is, they should look like this:
<img src="bookcover.png" width="90" height="150" alt=""/>
Consider what happens when every image on your page is replaced with its
alt
text, because this is exactly
what happens for a blind user. The page is likely to be imperfect under these conditions, but try to make it as
sensible as possible.
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