On Monday, January 13,2003, Brion Vibber brion@pobox.com wrote:

The spec doesn't mention anything about linebreaks in alt text, so we

can't rely on them to actually break lines; Lynx for instance (quite correctly) considers linebreaks in put to be regular whitespace, and only breaks alt text for long lines.

Also, Multiline ASCII art would likely be much worse than TeX for blind users with a screen reader.

I notice there's also a "longdesc" attribute for images, does anything support it? (It references an external URl, though.)

In regard to the "alt" attribute, my html books say that the text does not wrap around. In regard to the "longdesc" attribute, according to the www3c guidelines on accessibility at:

http://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG10-HTML-TECHS/#image-text-equivalent

the "longdesc" attribute is used when a short text-equivalent is not sufficient to convey all of the information one wants to about an image. It points to an html file that contains the description and is used in addition to the "alt" attribute.

Example:

<IMG src="97sales.gif" alt="Sales for 1997" longdesc="sales97.html">

In sales97.html:

A chart showing how sales in 1997 progressed. The chart is a bar-chart showing percentage increases in sales by month. Sales in January were up 10% from December 1996, sales in February dropped 3%, ..

(example taken directly from "HTML Techniques for Web Accessibility Guidelines 1.0", Secs. 7.1, 7.2 at above address)

Hope I'm answering the right question...

Best Regards,

Ruth Ifcher --