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I'm curious whether the CSS visually-hidden technique, most commonly used on font icons, for alternative image text is preferable to using the alt attribute. The argument against the alt attribute being that a screen reader announces "Graphic" any time it sees and <img> which is less natural. For example:
<p>ABC <img src="right-arrow.png" src="converts to"> XYZ</p>
Reads as "ABC graphic converts to XYZ"
<p>
ABC
<span class="visually-hidden">converts to</span>
<img src="right-arrow.png" src="" aria-hidden="true">
XYZ
</p>
Reads as "ABC converts to XYZ"
I can agree it's less natural when screen reader reads "Graphic" every time we focus on some image. From the other hand, straightforward explanation of type of content may be extremely important for people with impairments. Navigating through site is hard enough, so if we can narrow the field of interpretation, it's advised to do it.
What I mean is surfing the Internet with screen reader is not a perfect experience. But for the moment we have to stick to it and by making some things more schematic, we actually make it a little more clearer.
Also we can look to WCAG docs about this issue where there's a few advised techniques to choose from.
Situation A: If a short description can serve the same purpose and present the same information as the non-text content:
G94: Providing short text alternative for non-text content that serves the same purpose and presents the same information as the non-text content using one of the following techniques:
Short text alternative techniques for Situation A:
ARIA6: Using aria-label to provide labels for objects
ARIA10: Using aria-labelledby to provide a text alternative for non-text content
G196: Using a text alternative on one item within a group of images that describes all items in the group
H2: Combining adjacent image and text links for the same resource
H35: Providing text alternatives on applet elements
H37: Using alt attributes on img elements
H53: Using the body of the object element
H86: Providing text alternatives for ASCII art, emoticons, and leetspeak
So basically we could choose also from aria-attributes (and we can sometimes, but only if alt is not enough) BUT there is also one more strong argument for using alt attributes - SEO
Using alt text on your images can make for a better user experience, but it may also help earn you both explicit and implicit SEO benefits. Along with implementing image title and file naming best practices, including alt text may also contribute to image SEO.
While search engine image recognition technology has vastly improved over the years, search crawlers still can't "see" the images on a website page like we can, so it's not wise to leave the interpretation solely in their hands. If they don't understand, or get it wrong, it's possible you could either rank for unintended keywords or miss out on ranking altogether.
quote from here
Both techniques are counterproductive and useless.
In your example :
ABC → XYZ
This means nothing to me. I'm not blind, I have no screenreader. And I still don't understand what is this curious arrow.
Of course having an img tag (with an alt) may help me to understand the meaning of this arrow by hovering with a mouse. But, how can I guess that this arrow is in fact an img tag and that I have to hover with my mouse? How can I do without using a mouse?
Let's try another method :
ABC converts to XYZ
We don't use img tag, we don't use visually hidden text. Everybody with or without screenreader will understand.
There are a lot more people targeted by accessibility than blind people and you should always try to satisfy everybody.
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So I am now learning html, and I was just wondering why tags such as cite even exist. When I open a website as a user, I still see the text as italic when the code is written as cite.
I found that the tags are useful when it comes to screen readers, so basically for users that have problems with their vision.
Are there any more reasons for these tags? Thank you so much in advance!
Tags are small snippets of HTML coding that tell engines how to properly “read” your content. In fact, you can vastly improve search engine visibility by adding SEO tags in HTML.
When a search engine’s crawler comes across your content, it takes a look at the HTML tags of the site. This information helps engines like Google determine what your content is about and how to categorize the material.
Some of them also improve how visitors view your content in those search engines. And this is in addition to how social media uses content tags to show your articles.
In the end, it’s HTML tags for SEO that will affect how your website performs on the Internet. Without these tags, you’re far less likely to really connect with an audience.
About cite tag: The tag defines the title of a creative work (e.g. a book, a poem, a song, a movie, a painting, a sculpture, etc.). Note: A person's name is not the title of a work. The text in the element usually renders in italic.
Regarding the cite tag, according to MDN:
The HTML element is used to describe a reference to a cited
creative work, and must include the title of that work. The reference
may be in an abbreviated form according to context-appropriate
conventions related to citation metadata.
This enables you to manage all the css applied to quotes easily, were that to be your use case (if you happened to have a lot of quotes on a site). The italics you have observed are part of that css, or rather the default css applied by the browser.
In the broader spectrum
Oftentimes you will run into tags that as of today are not in use anymore. There's different industry standards for different time periods.
All of the tags exist, because there was a reason for web browsers to have a specific way of reading a piece of content.
For example centering a div used to be an almost legendary task that was achievable using multiple methods, all of which had different advantages and disadvantages. However, nowdays it's customary to use the flexbox.
Bottom line is its a way for web browsers and search engines to read and interpret the content you're providing
Tags such as and are used for text decoration nothing else you can also change text fonts and styles by using CSS.
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The website I'm making is for an author/illustrator and she wants words in the navigation bar to be written in her own handwriting, so the links in the navigation bar and her own name, which serves as the title, are all in the form of pictures rather than text.
Similarly, the homepage consists of some of her illustrations, each accompanied by a handwritten link, so that there is no text at all. I'm starting to realise from reading online that this may be seen as 'bad practise', so I want to ask those with more experience than me: how problematic is the lack of text?
I am not too worried about loading times and such - I've managed to make the image files quite small - but more things concerning accessibility and whether the site will appear in search engines.
And are there any ways I can avoid problems whilst still using the handwriting?
When you want to use images as navigation elements and are concerned about SEO and accessibility, you can use the alt-tag which you should use anyways.
Example:
<img src='images/nav1.png' alt='Home' />
Screenreaders and search engines use these tags to deal with images which they of course can not read.
There are two issues here. First, people who do not see images (for one reason or another) will find the site almost impossible to navigate, unless the img elements have alt attributes. Correctly written alt attributes resolve this problem and can be expected to provide adequate information to search engines as well. Second, people who use normal graphic browsers will see the texts in a specific appearance. This may mean that they find it less legible than normal text, perhaps even illegible. This greatly depends on the style of the text, including size and the contrast between text and background color.
If a downloadable font were used instead, via #font-face, then the latter problem would in principle be less severe, since users could disable page fonts and see the text in their preferred font. This is rather theoretical, though, and creating a font is nontrivial and probably not worth the effort here.
On the practical side, write the alt attributes and ask the author consider whether the font is legible enough to all visitors, including people with eyesight problems. It’s up to the author to decide whether the reduction in usability and accessibility is justified by the artistic impression made.
You can choose from many handwritting fonts and link them via #font-face.
If she wants to use her 'font', use images (ideally one image - looking for sprite) and put text underneath - it's call image replacement.
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When writing for the Web, should authors use the <i> element with a class, or should they use regular parentheses to indicate parenthetical phrases?
Example:
<p>I was walking to my car <i class="paren">on the other side of town</i>, when...</p>
<p>I was walking to my car (on the other side of town), when...</p>
Accompanied by:
.paren {
font-style: normal;
&::before {content: '(';}
&::after {content: ')';}
}
Just wondering which is the more semantically appropriate method. Of course the easier choice would be to simply type shift + 9 instead of having to mark it up with HTML, but according to The Draft, the <i> element should be used to indicate a change in voice, which is exactly what parenthetical phrases are: typically preceded by a short pause and a lowering of the volume and pitch of one's voice.
The same question applies to phrases surrounded by em dashes—which serve a similar purpose as phrases in parentheses—although em dashes can be much more flexible.
Parentheses already have meaning in English and you could argue that they are "markup" for a phrase. Parentheses indicate the text's relationship to the enclosing sentence/paragraph and provide a presentation cue (how to read/speak the text). In other words, adding HTML markup doesn't give you much semantic value that isn't already present by virtue of the plain text.
The extra markup serves a purpose if you want to differentiate the phrase from the rest of the paragraph or you need to add attributes that apply only to specific text. Putting tags around text allows you to work with that text in a clear fashion; you can style it, access it with script, parse it with a screen reader, etc. I would probably suggest a span instead of i; even though i has a broad potential usage, parenthesized text seems contrary to the common expectation.
Even though you can set it apart, parenthesized text probably does not always need to be set apart.1
Lastly, using CSS to provide the parentheses seems like excess work for the developer (and anyone reading it afterwards). It adds a level of indirection to a meaning that was already present.
1: There are cases where punctuation does not provide enough structure and should be augmented with markup. A simple example is a telephone number, as described here in 3.3.2.
http://www.w3schools.com/tags/tag_i.asp
I think this is pretty much correct. For accessibility reasons (such as software that reads out text), along with others, if parenthesis indicate a change in tone in text then i tag is the element that is appropriate. As a side note, as the original poster would seem to know : it no longer means "italics"in html5.
Just to beat this to death: most text readers that can handle the i tag probably don't make a sound that sounds like de-emphasis or whatever you might be trying to indicate with parenthesis, so if it's really important to get it just right, i'd suggest creating a class called de-emphsis that does not create parethesis and using parenthesis as well. Sounds like overkill but here's the reasoning.
De-emphasis can be used without parenthesis in other places.
The i tag probably does not sound like de-empahsis to text readers.
Visually impaired users might want to know actual parenthesis are there.
So, the crazy suggestion I'll make is this:
<p>I was walking to my car (<i class="de-emphasis">on the other side of town</i>), when...</p>
I do not have enough reputation to comment or I would have commented, so my final recommendation is an opinion, not a fact or anything like that. Just try to keep accessibility in mind when you make decisions about this kind of stuff.
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Does the title attribute in a link do the job of the real text in the link for SEO?
i.e
Web Design
is it the same as:
click here
when trying to get a good page rank for keywords like "web design"? is it like alt attribute in an image tag? or is it useless in SEO?
is it the same as:
click here
what's the difference between all the above?
Thank you in advance!
Alt is not a valid attribute for <a> elements.
Use alt to describe images
Use title to describe where the link is going.
The textvalue (click here) is the most important part
The title attribute gets more and more ignored.
Google looks far more on the link text than the title attribute.
For google the title tag is like a meta tag which is not important compared to content.
Image alt tags are however still very important (especially for image search)
The main feature of those tags is to provide usability for your users, not to feed informatino to search engines.
title attribute hasn't the same value as link text on SEO.
between
Web Design
and
click here
stick with the first option. But it is duplicate data, and has no real aggregate value on the case.
The main title purpose, it to give a tooltip about the link's page title. Putting the linked page title is the correct application (think on user first).
The alt attribute is for allow non-textual content to be represented. Consider the examples on WHATWG: http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/multipage/embedded-content-1.html#alt
EDIT
1
<span>2</span>
3
...
27
The title tag should be used to provide ADDITIONAL information for an element such as a link. If your title tag duplicates the actual link text then it will have no SEO benefit (there are arguments that the duplication could have a slight negative effect too). If, however, you can provide additional, meaningful information on the link such as further details about the content linked (especially if it links to a filetype that Google wouldn't be able to access/index) then they're definitely worth having.
Even as the tooltip in the browser, having a tooltip with the same text as the link text makes no sense, so as a rule of thumb only use it when you have something additional to add, not duplicate.
HTH
The text in the title attribute is not seen by crawlers. It won't cause keyword stuffing and it won't replace the anchor text for a given URL. It will, however, provide additional info if this is needed.
Use it to help your visitors not your SEO efforts.
alt is only valid for images — it's alternate text that serves for screen readers and people with images turned off to understand what an image represents.
title applies to most (if not all) elements, and can be used to provide tooltips for more information about parts of your pages.
I don't think either attribute plays any major roles in SEO. As Joe Hopfgartner says, the actual text of your links is much more significant in terms of semantics, which is why using "click here" as link text is discouraged these days.
Use this pseudo-code:
Text
For instance, this:
Example
renders like this:
Example
How to write good alt text for images to help screen reader and blind user to understand what is picture about ? and if we are using Alt text then what should be in a Title="text" if we are using both in special cases like menu images etc
I'm a screen reader user and will use Stack Overflow as an example of both the good and bad.
Alt tags should be brief and descriptive. For example, Stack Overflow's alt tags for the vote up and vote down options are nice since they don't take long to read and get to the point quickly. Examples of bad alt tags are the make this question a favorite and accept this answer. Neither of the tags are descriptive, the favorite tag is just "*" and the accept the answer tag is "check" The only way for me to tell what they are is to read the source or have someone sighted let me know what they are for.
As far as title attributes go I don't really have much advice. My screen reader doesn't read them by default so I don't normally use them. An example of something that could be useful is additional information. For example the reason my accepted answer rate is so low is because I have no way of telling whether I have accepted an answer on a question. It would be nice if the title attribute on the accept this answer graphic would say something like "click to accept this answer" if the answer wasn't accepted and "Click to remove this answer as the accepted answer" if it is the accepted answer.
You should not make the visually impaired user understand what the image is all about. For the blind, the image effectively doesn't exist, all that there is is the text.
The alt text should work as a single sentence/paragraph that can be replaced for the image, convey the same content and still make sense in the context of the adjacent content.
If the image is something that is part of the GUI, then the alt text should convey an action (a verb), line upvote, answer this or log out.
You should visit your site with links and try to understand your site. If there is for example a pie chart, its alt text should be a small summary of the percentages. If you just have a pretty flower next to a blog post, don't give it an innane alt text like flower image companion of blogpost #324 or even worse flower.jpg.
If the image is important to the navigation or to get information, try to give it an alt text that makes the site work without the image. If the image is only presentational, give it an empty alt text.
title, as far as I know, should only displayed when hovered, so they should give extra information to the image, so useless duplication of information should be avoided. For screen readers, this is a bit trickier, as support and configuration can be very different between users.
Some empirical data shows title as useless:
Most users of screen reading software do not change their default settings to access the TITLE attribute information on links.
Most screen reading software can access TITLE attribute content on form controls by default.
Some screen reading software cannot access TITLE attribute information.
Users of screen magnifiers can read TITLE attribute text at lower magnification levels.
Users of screen magnifiers cannot read TITLE attribute text, that contains more than 1 or 2 words, at higher magnification levels.
Here's good piece of advice, better put than I could
Use this to provide additional information that is not essential. Most visual browsers display title text as a tool tip when the element is hovered over, however it is up to the browser manufacturer to decide how the title text is rendered. Some will display the text in the status bar instead. Early versions of Safari did this, for instance.
One good use of the title attribute is to add descriptive text to links, especially if the link text itself doesn’t clearly describe the link’s destination. This way you can help visitors know where the link will take them, possible saving them from loading a page only to find out it wasn’t anything they’re interested in. Another potential use is to provide additional information for an image, like maybe a date or other information that is likely not essential.
Remember that the longdesc attribute is supposed to be a link to further information, not text as some people missuse it.
I think the best practise is to put same content in alt and title attributes.
Regarding 'what to write' - just simple, in few words what is on the picture.
Check this article where alt attributes are described pretty well: http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/html/alt.html