Dynamic And Rich But Not Without Text

The beginning of Web had everyone coding their own HTML files by hand. There was no other way. Individual HTML files were written and manually linked in other pages.

Then came in the dynamic page creation. The whole Web 2.0 system, amazing blogging tools like WordPress, Content Management Systems and Portals have proven that today a website should be dynamic and rich. It is inline with fast-moving world, or fast-moving virtual world that we live in.

Here, dynamic means more than one things:

• Database driven applications improve performance, security and storage of data. Scripting languages (PHP, JSP, ASP.Net, Perl, …) can then be used to dynamically retrieve the data and display it.
• Template based page creation help in creating consistent (X)HTML pages. Templates can be used effectively to ensure valid markup creation. This has attracted attention with increased stress on valid (X)HTML.
• User experience (AJAX) can be used effectively to enhance the user experience. It provides better interaction and encourages user participation.
• Separation of data and formatting is a necessity nowadays with more than one channel of deliveries for content. Users can use their PCs, handheld devices or take a printout to read content on your website. Separation of data and formatting helps in providing the same content in multiple formats. This also gives a chance to keep the website design uptodate with current trends, by just updating the formatting without affecting the data.
• Multimedia is now actively used over the Web. With websites being used for songs and increasing trend of podcasting, websites are not just about text any more. Technologies like Flash are used to provide “rich” experience to the user.

Even if we have justified this approach, they should provide alternative textual content for every non-text element. The output of each of these should also include the static HTML of the old days. Why? Two reasons – accessibility and search engine optimisation.

Web Was Made For Reading

It might seem a little outdated, but Web was made for reading. The browsers inherently support text, but require plugins for other technologies like Flash and playing multimedia. Even if you publish multimedia/images on your website, you should still provide alternative textual content which comes into play if the user does not have the plugin installed or if the images cannot be displayed or the user chooses to block them.

Adhering to accessibility leads to high level of search engine optimisation, which is exactly what Andy Hagan says (via ). The reason being that search engines can read only what is human readable. Content that humans cannot read or access cannot be read and hence indexed by search engines, which utlimately is the website owner’s loss.

Techniques For Alternative Textual Content

This is a core part of accessibility where the information is still accessible to the user, using the alt attribute. An alt attribute is provided for every non-text element, even the anchor element has an alt attribute. In XHTML Strict doctype, the alt attribute is mandatory.

Here is a good guidance for providing text equivalent for client-side image maps. There are similar techniques for applets and objects. longdesc attribute can be used to provide an alternate page which contains textual equivalent content of the corresponding non-text element.

There are some modern innovative approaches for making alternative content available. A modern approach to flash SEO has excellent advice for providing alternative text for SEO.

This is necessary because I think there has not been an uniform upgrade in technologies. While we consider multimedia to be core part of Web 2.0, search engines still read only text and browsers still need plugins for lot of technologies. Looking forward to more innovative ways.

More Reading

• Accessible alternatives
• Text-friendly Authoring
• Using of ALT text in IMGs

Technorati tags: alternative text, alt, longdesc, accessibility, search engine, ,

Copyright Abhijit Nadgouda.