Hello! Anyone know if an alt tag can be added to a picture so it is displayed on mouse over when the course is published?

All ideas welcome!

Many thanks  

Katy. The alt attribute shown upon mouseover is only functional in IE. It does not appear upon mouseover in other browsers such as Firefox. Hopefully, your learners will only be using IE to view your courseware.

Also, according to 1194.22, the purpose of an alt tag is to provide a text equivalent for every non-text element. In this case, the alt-tag is read by the assistive technology, such as a screen reader, which describes the image to a visually impared learner; who would not see the mouseover anyway.

To address your query directly, you would indeed need to edit the module's xml file where the images appear. As an example, this would be a straight forward alt="Image of a person speaking."  

This is my first day working with Course Lab. I'm also looking for an answer to this question. This is a key feature for ADA Section 508 compliance. Any graphic on the internet should have alternate text. I hope someone has an answer out there.
Thanks!  

I don't see any field for alttext in the developers iterface and in runtime.xml (where all data is stored) tehre are no alt tags.

A tedious job would be to add all alt tags in runtime.xml but chances of mistakes and problems are too big.

I'm glad at least a small part of the governement in our country has loosened the compliance. Now finally we can depend on the use of flash and flash video to make courseware.

My opinion it is better to make special courseware for the deaf and other for the blind than to try to make something that everyone can understand  

Hmmmmm... 508 was in many ways kinda nanny state stuff but well intentioned. I would agree that it is better to make versions for specific disabilities rather than try to cater for every eventuality in one place. That is a sure fire recipie for mediocrity.
On a point of accuracy I would like to point out that you should infact be using the title part of the html img tag for this and NOT the alt tag which was intended for something else.
It's only because the early versions of IE displayd the alt tag and the image (it's an old unfixed bug) that it's so widely used. The alt tag actually should only be displayed when the image isn't, that is still it's intended use in WC3 standards.
For fun make a simple html page add a picture with the alt tag filled in and view it with IE the tag text will pop up when you hover over the window, now add a title tag as well that's different to the alt and you'll see that new text now.
Use the right tags for the right use and it will work across browsers people, that's why there are standards like WC3.  

Just for interest the alt and title tags date back to the early NCSA mosiac browser which started the use of images displayed inline rather than in a seperate window. I had the dev ports from original unix x-windows on my amiga from about june 92. Windows didn't see this advanced stuff for a while later. Around then on windows (3.1) cello was really the most advanced browser but not to friendly to install and set up.
 

I find it quite ammusing that the authors of 508 got this so wrong... "HTML code already provides an "Alt Text" tag for graphics which can serve as a verbal descriptor for graphics"
Sorry it's a textual descriptor.

Also Katy it is worth noting that this condition does apply to 'federal' web sites and not private or other public sites.
So on a private site you can ignore these tags and be compliant.

It might be a better option to hack the css. If you make the main page contents for visual use but stop screen readers using it then add a 'hidden' css tag that is readable but hides the text content from visual display but available to the screen reader you could put your text for a screen reader in that.
It is likely that if your visual content relies on a text item referencing an image then the same content for a screen reader will need to be more verbose and descriptive so a different text content might well be a good idea.  

This probably sounds like a dumb question but I have limited experience in this area.

Can you show me how to add a title tag to an image? I see where it has been mentioned that you use the module's xml file, but I'm not exactly sure which file this is (there are multiple xml files associated with my module).Can someone give an example of what the script should look like?  

First make a backup ;-) then install notepad++ (free text editor, can handle xml very well) then open 1/runtime.xml

Now search for the filenaam of the image. You'll find something like:

<object id="IMG_6" x="94" y="122" w="192" h="144" z="32" display="none" begin="0" preload="images/p003.jpg">
<data>
<![CDATA[<img src="images/p003.jpg" style="width:192px;height:144px;border-width:0;"/>]]>
</data>
</object>

Within the data tag you see the plain html. Enter the title tag or any other tag f.i. after the src tag.

 

I added tags via notepad++ to the runtime file, but strangely, whenever I save the file, close it out, and then make edits to the course, I find that all the tags disappear. How do I prevent this from happening?  

I added tags via notepad++ to the runtime file, but strangely, whenever I save the file, close it out, and then make edits to the course, I find that all the tags disappear. How do I prevent this from happening?  

I'm afraid: not.
 

If you add the tags BEFORE you publish then the changes will be overwritten.
So you need to add the tags AFTER you publish the changes.