Demonstration of Lynx ALT texts

Introduction

So, I have done what I can in a few spare moments to address their request. This demonstration document requires you to display the in-line images that it contains. It would be incomprehensible otherwise. (Consequently I'd ask you not to treat this document as a good example of how to write ALT texts in general!!). The inlines I used here are displaying fine on my browser but it's possible they might get dithered or otherwise not look their best in some other browser situations.

It would perhaps be appropriate to mention first that Lynx works in a terminal emulation window (or indeed on a real terminal - there are still a few around), and that the detailed appearance of the display depends on the characteristics of the terminal window that is in use. Typically, however, such a window would be at least 24 lines high, and at least 80 columns wide, and uses a monospaced font. All the examples in here are based on such a window. One possible appearance for such a window is this:

with the following excerpts indicating the kind of variation that's possible with different terminal emulations and configuration settings:

This is the same terminal emulator as above, but it has been configured using different colours. Nothing else was changed for this example. In both of these examples, the WWW links are denoted by using a different display colour.

This is a plain DECTERM terminal emulation, using the default settings that I get on a particular installation. As you can see, with this one the links are denoted by highlighting.

This one is from some version of XTERM. Here again, highlighting is used to denote links.

For variety, there's also an example made with the "color-slang" version of Lynx.

The Demonstration

Earlier versions of Lynx differ in some respects: those prior to a certain release (sorry, I'm not sure exactly which, but Lynx 2.3 was like this) will show [IMAGE] instead of [INLINE] or [LINK] as shown here. Also, Lynx has quite a range of configuration options, and I have only explored a few of them here.

The canonical place to start for information on Lynx is http://lynx.browser.org/.

As you can see, items 1 and 4 show the effect of omitting the ALT attribute: the display of [INLINE] really serves no purpose here other than to annoy the reader, and the display of [LINK] is little better if the author expects to convince the sceptical reader that there is some useful information to be had by using this link, whatever it may be. (I remind you that many Lynx users have access, if they so choose, to image display facilities. What they cannot do with Lynx is to display images in-line. But a significant number will have access to display facilities for images that have been downloaded, and/or have access to a graphical browser when they want to use one.) I think it should be obvious that for a decorative inline, number 2 is the better choice; it might be argued that a Lynx user will occasionally want to download purely decorative images, but as we will see later, Lynx provides users with a means for doing that.

Item 5 shows the result of specifying an empty ALT text for an image that is a link (i.e is within an anchor). This would be silly if the image constituted the entire anchor, but if there is also some text (outside of the IMG but within the scope of the anchor) to act as the link then this could be a perfectly reasonable choice. Again we will see later how the reader is able to load the INLINE itself, if they wish to do so.

Items 3 and 6 show the effect of providing some text. As you see, the Lynx reader will, with these settings, be unaware that the text is being displayed as the result of an ALT text, rather than as ordinary text, but in either case it is clear from the display whether this text is part of a link or not. In many cases this will be the correct thing to do. My general discussion of ALT texts covers this question in more detail.

Some other settings available in Lynx

As you can see, the reader now has separate handles on the inlines and on the links, giving them the opportunity to retrieve anything they want, even in those cases where the author specified an empty ALT text. Lynx omits the [LINK] handle when there is a non-empty ALT text available, since the text already serves well as a link. The "long and short" of this demonstration is that the author needs to take no additional steps to allow the Lynx user to access any inline image or link. The author's job - and this applies to all browsers and not only to Lynx - is to work out what information they actually want to communicate to those readers who are using text-only mode, and then to put that information into their ALT texts. This really isn't the major chore that many authors on the HTML authoring group are making it out to be: the hard part is to decide what information it is that you want to communicate, and you should be doing that anyway. Once you have decided what you want to communicate, marking it up with HTML is an almost trivial adjunct to the authoring task in my opinion.

The next variation is to run Lynx in its numbered-links mode. I'm told that this is the method of choice for blind readers, since they can then choose a link by giving its number, rather than having to move the cursor onto it. The relevant part of the display then looks like this.

Just to complete the picture, this is how the numbered-links mode looks when you issue the keyboard "*" command.

You'll notice that in this mode, both the inline images and the links get their own separate number assigned, so that the user can call them up by number. All perfectly logical and consistent.

As I said earlier, this by no means exhausts the number of tricks that the Lynx reader has available, but it should suffice to demonstrate that the user of Lynx has facilities available to them to do anything they could reasonably want, apart from actually displaying images in-line with their text.

How about forms with INPUT TYPE=IMAGE?

Original materials © Copyright 1994 - 1999 A.J.Flavell & Glasgow University