Improving Accessibility in Monkey Album

Nov 12, 2006

I am in the process of improving the accessibility of my photo album here at the site. My primary goal is to make the alternate text representations of each image something worthwhile, instead of the filename cop-out that I chose a while back. Each image now has an associated alt-text data record, and entering these by hand one at a time (there is no mass-update capability at the moment) is taking quite a while. As of this writing, I have provided alt-text values for six of the ten albums that I have posted. I hope to have them all completed by tomorrow.

You will find that the alternate text for the album thumbnail is rather weak at the moment ('Thumbnail for album XYZ'). This is due to the unfortunate way I constructed the various database tables. I essentially cannot obtain the alternate text record for the album's thumbnail image, since I store the filename for the thumbnail, not the corresponding image ID. Later on I may improve this text, but I'm going to leave it as is for the moment. The alternate text for each full size image, along with each image's thumbnail, has been greatly improved, and that was what I set out to do.

2 Comments

kip

2:35 PM on Nov 13, 2006
I was thinking about this with my photo album, I ended up just using the title of the picture for the alt and title tags. Although the idea of an accessible photo album seems a little unnecessary anyway. I mean, it's kind of like making classical music accessible to the deaf by giving them a description of what they would be hearing.

Jonah

3:07 PM on Nov 13, 2006
Accessible photo albums do indeed seem awkward, but it makes search engine robots (all of whom are 'blind') happier. That was one primary reason I wanted to improve what I had.

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