[Sigia-l] 508 Compliance - Alt Tags for Button Images

[brendaj at interaccess.com]

An old-but-still-valid post from Jim Thatcher, one of the developers of the original IBM Home Page Reader, IBM Accessibility Guidelines, Vice-Chair of the EITAAC which proposed standards for Section 508, and (among other things), one of the authors of "Constructing Accessible Web Sites" (great resource, I highly recommend it), on the subject of button alt text:


[snip]
Your buttons should have succinct alt text, best to have the same text as
appears on the button. Screen readers and talking browsers pick that up.

The title attribute is a different kind of beast. I recommmend using that
developers use the title attribute if they wany a tool tip (with mouse over)
that is more informative than the text on the button.
[snip]

(full thread in the w3c archives:
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/w3c-wai-ig/2001AprJun/0477.html )