Image ALT Text

[AutoEvo]

Hi All,

I'm in a quandry and need your help. I'm struggling to get the image ALT text published and don't understand why that is... Within Xara MX I'm right clicking>web properties>image and then within the image caption text I'm writing what the image is 'Lamborghini V10 Engine' for example. But when the site is published, this image, instead of reading as Lamborghini V10 Engine is being read as 'image 345'.

A an example link of a page I'm looking at is here: http://www.auto-evolution.co.uk/camb...hip-tuning.htm

So why is the image ALT text not being published? What am I doing wrong? I'm not after a pop up message, our users don't need that. But, for SEO it certainly helps to get your image ALT texts published rather than just image numbers.

thanks and regards,
AutoEvo

[covoxer]

Look at the page source. The alt="Lamborghini V10 Engine" is there. The alt text is not supposed to pop-up on mouse over. This actually only happens in IE and we have it disabled to make our pages behave the same in all browsers. There's a "title" attribute for a pop-up text. You can set it separately from the alt in the "Web Properties > Mouse-over > Show popup text (Title)" field.

[AutoEvo]

Why is it then that when you click on the actual picture and say chose, 'save as' it saves it as a number rather than the actual image alt text name?

[covoxer]

"Save as" uses the original file name of the image by default. That number you see is the actual file name of the image you click on. Alt attribute is not used for this. Alt attribute is to provide an alternative text description of the image for the browsers that can not display the image or visitors that can not see the image. It should contain short description of what is pictured. They are used by search engines to index images (there's no other way for Google to know that your image has Lamborghini and not a cockroach pictured), they are used for accessibility reasons (people that can't see are able to know what is there by reading alt text), for text browsers that do not display any graphics, and finally, that alt text is what you see in the image box while you wait for the actual image to be loaded on the very slow connection. Some people on the slow or traffic limited connections choose to not display the images automatically. This way they may know which image may be worth loading as well as general understanding of what this page is about without loading all the images.
But alt attribute is not there to be used as a hint for a file name.