[WEB4LIB] 'Alt' tag question

[Elizabeth A Reiten/lib/Okstate]

As Andrew said in his reply, yes, it is the correct method.  The primary 
reason for this is that a screen reader will read anything it finds 
between the quotation marks in an alt tag.  If you have any text in there, 
including a space, it will read it.  So you could wind up with your screen 
reader saying "space" to you when it reaches spacer images... very strange 
and wastes time. 

Beth Reiten, Librarian
Digital Library Services
Edmon Low Library
Oklahoma State University
Phone: 405-744-9109
Email: reitene at okstate.edu


Hello everyone,

I seem to recall W3C mentioning somewhere that graphics used for
positional reasons only (e.g. 'spacer.gif') should be assigned
an 'alt' attribute like the following:
  alt=""
 
This allows HTML code to validate properly, and supposedly
increases page accessibility for those visually-challenged
persons who use 'screen-readers' and other similar tools.

Can anyone confirm or deny whether this is accurate?

Cheers,
Raymond