image of long text document provide text as well

[ggeoff]

Hi

I have a client who wants to provide me with Microsoft Publisher documents to add to his website. The material will be added via a content management system. I can't just select all and paste into the CMS so I have saved a copy of the Publisher document as an image file, a png. Fine, the doc displays well. Ideally, I should provide a text equivalent for accessibility purposes but the Alt tag won't take more than a hundred words, using IE 8 and Firefox won't even display the contents of the Alt tag at all.

Has anyone an idea as to how to provide a text equivalent?

Thanks Geoff

[Kraai]

Hi

I think you know that it never could be a good idea to display content text as an image, for all the reasons you mentioned above, as well as it is very SEO unfriendly, and a problem for screen readers, or people who browse with images off.

As you said, the "alt"tag does not always display in all browsers correctly, and if the text is longer than the image, it might even get only part of it actually readable. To test any "alt" text behind an image, browse with your images switched off, and see if you can read all the text.

Some people make use of the "longdesc" tag to do longer text, but if it works okay, I do not know. You will create a html file, say "image1.html" and do this with your image:

<img src=”http://www.yoursite.com/images/yourimage.jpg” alt=”A short description you can put here” longdesc=”image1.html”>

[ggeoff]

Hi

I think you know that it never could be a good idea to display content text as an image, for all the reasons you mentioned above, as well as it is very SEO unfriendly, and a problem for screen readers, or people who browse with images off.

As you said, the "alt"tag does not always display in all browsers correctly, and if the text is longer than the image, it might even get only part of it actually readable. To test any "alt" text behind an image, browse with your images switched off, and see if you can read all the text.

Some people make use of the "longdesc" tag to do longer text, but if it works okay, I do not know. You will create a html file, say "image1.html" and do this with your image:

<img src=”http://www.yoursite.com/images/yourimage.jpg” alt=”A short description you can put here” longdesc=”image1.html”>

Thanks Kraai

I thought that a possible answer would be to use the "longdesc" There are several scenarios where an image contains a lot of text that is presented with photography or other graphic design. In this case the reason why the client wants to publish his newsletter is that the text is part of what is a rather attractive document.

I have tried saving the Publisher document as an MHTML file but can't accommodate the file within the website.

I understand that the use of "longdesc" is deprecated and won't even work in many browsers, and is not even in the HTML5 specification. So how would I include a link in the img tag, or is that not possible? If so that seems odd.

Geoff

[Kraai]

What I do, with clients sending me their pdf news letters to publish on their sites, I simply provide a text or image link to the uploaded pdf file. A user who wants to read the news letter, simply clicks on the link, and if they have Adobe installed on their computer, the link will open the pdf file for them to read in their browser, and if they want, they can download/save the file as well.

Why don't you re-create the publisher document exactly as your client have it, by using html and css, and make a seperate html page with this. Then you just use the <iframe> tags to display the re-created html document into the cms page you want it to display in?

Or

Create a html template that looks like your client's publisher document, and provide that for your client to produce the content in?

[ggeoff]

What I do, with clients sending me their pdf news letters to publish on their sites, I simply provide a text or image link to the uploaded pdf file. A user who wants to read the news letter, simply clicks on the link, and if they have Adobe installed on their computer, the link will open the pdf file for them to read in their browser, and if they want, they can download/save the file as well.

Why don't you re-create the publisher document exactly as your client have it, by using html and css, and make a seperate html page with this. Then you just use the <iframe> tags to display the re-created html document into the cms page you want it to display in?

Or

Create a html template that looks like your client's publisher document, and provide that for your client to produce the content in?

Thanks Kraai

That's a lot to think about :)

Geoff