Is there a way to add an ALT tag to images stored with the image manager?

AFAIK there is not a way to do this

BTW it's advisable to use title="my text" and not alt="my text"

'title' is W3C standard . Mozilla does not recognise 'alt' tags.

Ouch, I don't have to like it, but that's good to know. And thanks, Carnuke, on the Title vs ALT tag tip. I didn't know about that.

Your welcome... I learned the hard way, when I noticed that mozilla did not display 72 image alt tag texts

Note that alt and title attributes serve two different purposes.

All images should have the alt attribute, for XHTML-compliancy. The alt attribute's intended purpose is to provide alternate text to display if the image cannot be displayed.

IE happens to use the alt attribute as hover text. Mozilla uses the title attribute as hover text, which is the proper behavior.

So while all images should have the alt attribute, only images that need hover text should have a title attribute.

Don't leave out the alt tag if at all possible. It is essential for text-based browsers, and for accessibility for users with special needs.

Neither of these attributes are designed for use in Firefox or IE. They are there to help people who are blind or partially sighted.

Rowdie is right. The ALT attribute is absolutely essential for assisted technology browsers and text browsers like Lynx. If you don't use ALT text for images, your site will fail the most basic accessibility test. Lynx does not recognise the TITLE attribute.

Dave_L is absolutely correct about the usage. The ALT attribute should be used to provide a short but meaningful description of an image. The TITLE attribute should really only be used for hypertext links to provide an extended description of where the link is taking the viewer. Even then it should only be used if the link is not self-explanatory.

You shouldn't use both on an image just to attain a cross-browser visual tooltip, as if both are read aloud by a screen-reader it makes nonsense.

I have already requested ALT attribute for the image manager and hope it finds a way into a release soon. The good news for terrion is, if you use the Koivi wysiwyg editor, you can place images from the image manager into an article and add an ALT attribute as you do so. One reason why Koivi gets my vote if the dev team are considering an integral editor for XOOPS in a future release.

Point taken ... my comment was from this reference from W3C HEREand Here

The alt attribute is alternative text to explain what a image is when the image cannot be shown. It is for important images and info. If the image is not important and is say just the corner of something for layout, then leave the alt attribute empty as it need not describe itself for the visually impaired etc.

Title attribute is more directed at links and such to my understanding, it is meant to add additional info (in the form of a tooltip), for instance on my web site I use to with the acronym tag to show a tooltip to define terms I use.

Both sides have argued here that Microsoft is wrong in making the alt attribute a tooltip on one side and that the W3C explanation does not say it may not be a tooltip on the other. Eitherway IE has ALT as a tooltip and Mozilla does not.

The alt tag is not supposed to be displayed as a tooltip. This behavior was introduced by Netscape 4, which then was emulated by MSIE. It is outside the spec.

http://www.mozilla.org/docs/web-developer/faq.html#alttooltip


Why doesn’t Mozilla display my alt tooltips?

Contrary to a popular belief stemming from the behavior of a couple browsers running on the Windows platform, alt isn’t an abbreviation for ‘tooltip’ but for ‘alternative’. The value of the alt attribute is a textual replacement for the image and is displayed when the image isn’t.

Mozilla doesn’t display the alt attribute as a tooltip, because it has been observed that doing so encourages authors to misuse the attribute.

* When the alternative text is shown in a tooltip, some authors write bad alt texts, because they intend the text as auxiliary tooltip text and not as a replacement for the image. (‘Bad’ in the sense that the textual alternative is less useful for people who don’t see the image.)
* When the alternative text is shown in a tooltip, other authors don’t want to supply textual alternatives at all, because they don’t want tooltips to appear. (Again, making things harder for people who don’t see the image.)

There is another attribute that Mozilla shows as a tooltip: title. In fact, the HTML 4.01 specification suggests that the title attribute may be displayed as a tooltip. However, this particular display method is not required and some other browsers show the title attribute in the browser status bar, for example.

At this point some people feel compelled to post a “But IE…” rant in the newsgroups or in Bugzilla. Please note that Mac IE 5 behaves in the same way as Mozilla when it comes to the alt and title attributes. Windows IE also shows the title attribute in a tooltip.

Quote:

This is a very good point. In fact, you might want to leave the ALT attribute empty for some graphics that you think are important. For example, if you have the name of a company directly under a logo, despite what the guidelines say, there's no point having "Acme Corp Logo" as ALT text for the logo. A screen reader might speak: "Image description... Acme Corp Logo... Image. Welcome to the Acme Corporation" For clarity, it would be better to dump the ALT description for the logo and let the reader speak "Welcome to the Acme Corporation".

When you *read* the page rather than see it, it makes sense. Why would a blind person need to know there's a logo there?.

The only thing is, if you are using a visual HTML editor to build your site, you may need to manually enter the 'empty' ALT value as double-quote marks in the code (Eg. alt="" no space between) rather than leave the ALT field empty. If you don't do this, Lynx will display the image filename, e.g. 'logo.gif'.

The other consideration of course is that text browsers read web page content in the order they get it. So even if a DIV for a menu appears on the left, if the DIV code is physically located at the bottom of the page of HTML, that's where the text browser will put it.

If you have never used it, I can recommend adding Lynx to your browser list. It's free, works in DOS mode on Windows and gives you a refreshing screen of text - just like the good old days!.

There are a couple of competing assisted-technology browsers for Windows. Like all products aimed at the disabled through local authority funds, they are expensive, one disgracefully so. But if your website makes sense in Lynx (no images, no layout, no CSS) then anyone who has a visual impairment, or who can only use the keyboard to navigate, should be able to use your site.