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When noticing your post type key at the bottom of the page (see screen shot) i was wondering why you don’t have the alt text enabled for these images used in the threads above?
You are using the alt text for the 'New Thread', 'Post Reply' and 'Announcement' images, so it was a bit of a mystery to me why you wern't for those other images also.
I also noticed that there are other post icons used, which are not in the key. I understand what they mean, but again wondered why they wern't included.
The number of replies are already shown in the thread list. Why describe an image which indicates the number of replies in text when the number of replies are already listed?
The leftmost column provides information about weather or not the current logged in user has posted in a thread and if so; when they last posted in the thread. The number of replies that the thread has is easily obtained by reading the replies column.
Its by design of the forum software manufacturer - vBulletin.
Whatever it is, it isn't required.Quote:
Originally Posted by RobDog888
Thanks Rob.
Visual, I was aware about when you logged in, it showing alt text on the users last post on the thread.
My query was based on the fact thats it normally considered good practice to use the alt attribute to improve the display and usefulness of your web page for people who have text-only browsers.
Also, what you will find is that there is normally at least 400+ guests on the forums, and as much as its a no brainer working out what the icon means, it would of been a 'nice to have' so that anyone could get a quick description by hovering the mouse over any of the message icons.
The alt text also replaces images that cannot be downloaded and is used by text readers for those with visual impairments and text browsers only. The alt attributes is required for all images in the XHTML standard and should not be set to a null string unless the image had no descriptive value.
The thread images are purely for visual purposes and have no descriptive value. Again why would you want to hover over an image to find out weather or not it has more than 20 replies or 200 views when you can look at this information by glancing to the right? Or looking at the image.
The only value it would have, would be to save people scrolling down and looking for the key at the bottom. Other than that, it would simply be a waste of bandwidth.
Well, thats where we disagree, I believe they have some descriptive value.Quote:
Originally Posted by visualAd