Q and A: Why can’t I see my Alt Img tags?

Skip to content
Skip to menu

Jun 29

Q and A: Why can’t I see my Alt Img tags?

Tag: Q and A, alt tags, usability, web design — Kalena Jordan @ 10:10 pm

You look familiar. Are you on Twitter? Subscribed to my feed yet?

Hi Kalena

I have been practising on my own site. When I add an alt img tag I still cannot see the text when I scroll over the image. I don’t understand this, could you please help? My URL is [URL removed for privacy reasons]. There is no alt img tag at present (I took it out because it didn’t seem to work).

Thanks in advance and regards,

Barry

—————————————————————————————————

Hi Barry

If you’re using Firefox, you won’t see alt tags when you mouseover. But if you right click on the image with your mouse and view *properties*, you should see your alt text in the alt field.

Or you could just view your site in Internet Explorer where the mouseovers should work fine.

Regardless of which browser you use, search engines will be able to index your alt tags. Plus text to speech software will be able to read them for visually-impaired visitors, so you should include them wherever possible for site usability purposes.

Help this post get attention:

One Response to “Q and A: Why can’t I see my Alt Img tags?”

Fibo says:
July 1st, 2009 at 10:24 pm

If you put text in alt attribute for a link <a or an image <img, it will appear as a rollover text with Internet Explorer, but not with Firefox.

To get the same with Firefox, add the title attribute.
So in fact you put your text twice, once in ‘alt’, once in ‘title’.
And be happy!