In fact, it’s a lot of fun being retired and doing all the things there was no time for a few years ago. No sympathy needed.

No, the content won’t be posted elsewhere. It disappears. Most is testing on such old versions of screen readers that it’s now obsolete.

Thanks anyway for the well intended greetings Ruth. All the best…

Cheers,
Ruth

PS: Will the content here be moved to another location when the domain lapses?

Keep having fun.

Cheers

Here’s a suggestion for you. For the blog theme, editing the PHP is OK. For images that you add as posts, you can have your cake and eat it too. Here’s how. After adding an image to a post, (still in the post editor), click on the image and hit the Edit link. You will find several tabs. On one you can change the “Title” to be the text you want to appear on hover. On the Advanced tab, you can change the Alternate text. A lot of people duplicate this text, and that is minimally OK. It’s better to have each be suited to its purpose though. Most blind people configure their screen readers to not announce title text because of the repetition. That reduces annoyance and works very well for sites that have really good alternative text.

Thanks for stopping by, and for putting extra effort into accessibility.

Comicpress uses the title attribute as a deliberate hovertext element of the theme and the name of the file as alt text. Unfortunately the simplest solution for me was to add my alternative text to the title field and hack the php code to make the alt attribute also use the same data that is for the title attribute.

Now I have a dilemma. The hover text adds value for sighted people just as the alt text adds value for the blind or partially sighted but using both as you say is irritating for those using accessibility devices.

Any thoughts? Should I be ‘democratic’ and go with what will be the majority audience? Would the one’s using screen readers be understanding?

Some think it perverse to add accessibility features to what is a visual web site (cartoons) but I like the whole idea that the web is multi layered. If you can communicate an idea, story or point of view visually effectively and with humour (comics and cartoons) then why can’t you also try communicating that idea verbally? It’s two different methods and work in entirely different ways but it’s worth a try.

Which brings me to you describing the alt attribute as a description of the image. The alt attribute is an alternative (it provides another possibility (of understanding)) of the image. The example most people use is of a company logo image. Using ‘Image of our company logo’ would describe it well. Using ‘Company name’ alone doesn’t but does exactly the same job as the company logo image is doing.

The way I was taught to test it out was to display the web page as text only. Then read it aloud to yourself and if the alt text fits smoothly into the flow of words with not even a hint of interference then you have done it well.