Adding images - 4
JPEG: Processing a scanned photograph
Alternative Text
JPEG: Processing a scanned photograph cont.
Adding this file to the page is simple, assuming the image file is in the same folder as your Web pages
- Switch to MS FrontPage Express
- Open the Web page you wish to place the image in
- Place the text insertion point at the position in the page you want the picture
- Click the Insert Image button on the FrontPage Express toolbar
- The Image dialog box should appear, with the Other Location tab selected
Click on thumbnail for larger version
- Click the Browse.. button to bring up the usual Image file dialog box
- Navigate to where your Web pages are kept
- Select the image file you want to include
- Click OK, and the file appears in the page
Alternative Text
Some users are on very slow connections, and they 'surf' the web with images switched off. Other users are using text only browsers such as Lynx, and some can't see images for the very simple reason that they are blind, and use voice synthesis software to use Web pages.
Web pages can have embedded text captions for each image - and these captions will display when the image is not available. The captions are known as 'Alternative Text', from the HTML tag used to embed them in the page. To insert an Alternative Text for an image, just
- Open the page with the image in FrontPage Express
- Double click on the image to bring up the Image Properties dialog box, and make sure the General tab is selected
- Add some suitable text to the Text box in the Alternative Representations section of the Image Properties dialog box (middle section)
- Click OK to accept the text
- Save your changes to the page
If you open your page in MS Internet Explorer or Netscape Navigator version 4 or later, you can check the Alternative Text by holding your mouse over the image. Your Alternative Text phrase should appear like a ToolTip, in a small yellow box;
Choosing alternative text is quite an art if you want your pages to be intelligible to people without image display capability. You should
- Make the text short, but descriptive of the contents
- Include some text with all images - even if the text is just a space. If you don't, some text only browsers will insert the word [IMAGE] to show there is an image!
- Avoid using Alternative Text like 'blue button' when you use the same small blue button 50 times on the page - otherwise people using voice synthesis will hear 'blue button' 50 times......
Alan Flavell has provided an in depth discussion of how to provide Alternative Text captions for images. Images are not included in the HTML file, the file just makes a reference or hyperlink to the location of the image file. If you look at the HTML codes in your page, you will find an <IMAGE> tag with quite a lot of things in it. the table below provides a description of the IMG tag for the first illustration in this page.
<img src="im2ht3.gif" alt="Chart from Excel 97" width="302" height="206">
img src="im2ht3.gif"
This is the IMG tag, and the address of the image file. The image file could be anywhere on the Web, you could include an address like http://www.someplace.com/nice.gif to link to someone else's image. This tends to increase the time for pages to load, and most people copy images to their own server (with permission of course).
alt="Chart from Excel 97"
The alt tag labels the alternative text for the image. Alan Flavell's discussion will mention the ALT tag.
width="302" height="206"
The Width and Height of the image in pixels. The browser can make use of this information to 'reserve' space for the image while the KTML file is loading. This prevents the browser having to continually reformat the page to take account of new images arriving.
