[Xerte-dev] Tooltips / Alt text (title vs. alt attributes)

[Fay Cross]

I've noticed that a change has been made to lots of page types so that alt attributes on images are now title attributes. This seems to be in response to a bug on GitHub (https://github.com/thexerteproject/xerteonlinetoolkits/issues/104) where tooltips were said to not work.

I'm not sure that changing all alt to title really solves the problem and really it's a wording problem on the editor rather than a problem to be fixed in the LOs. I thought that the main use of tooltip fields in the editor was to add a description of the image to screen readers. Previously these descriptions added as alt attributes did mean that a tooltip appeared when the image was hovered over but this no longer seems to happen in most browsers. Using the title attribute instead does force a tooltip to appear but I don't think it's ideal for screen readers (http://www.w3.org/TR/html/dom.html#the-title-attribute)

What does everyone think about this? Should the wording in the editor be changed from 'Tooltip' to 'Description' or 'Alt text' or do you think that it's more important for it to stay as tooltip and keep the hover functionality even if this might be more fiddly for users of screen readers?

Fay
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