Discuss: Facts and Opinion About Fahrner Image Replacement

by Joe Clark

11 Running page through a translator

One notion I haven’t seen mention of is what happens when you run a web page through a translator, such as Babelfish? The text does get translated, but of course the images stay the same. So when you use FIR and display a translated page, you don’t get the translated headers — but the translation is there! It would be nice to have a way of getting the text version to show up in the form of a tooltip, or use some other device to force the text version that is replaced by the graphic to show up, so the page can be understood.

posted at 10:49 am on October 22, 2003 by Dan Wood

12 The css on + image off problem...

…can be solved by the (http://levin.grundeis.net/files/20030809/alternatefir.html) Levin Alexander modification, that brings back the empty span tag, and requires a non-transparent image, because it’s layered over the text. Still, I used it on http://www.sha.hu/ (with slight modifications), and will use on others, because it’s unacceptable to me that for a given case (images turned off) everything disappears with the other methods.

posted at 11:05 am on October 22, 2003 by I. G.

13 A couple of bugs/missing features...

I’m sure you’re aware of these, but ALA is missing:

1. A “Remember me” box for all this info.
2. A “Print” style-sheet.
3. It would be nice to see something like SmartPants (http://daringfireball.net/projects/smartypants/) to tidy up all these posts. ;)

That is all. Keep up the good work!

posted at 11:40 am on October 22, 2003 by Conan

14 Sitepoint article and text-indent

I feel honored that the Sitepoint article (mentioned in an earlier comment) discusses the method that I use and popularized. The author did a great job talking about both the up and downsides to it.

Made For All (www.madeforall.com) will soon be coming out with Issue 5 which includes my take on image replacement.

Joe — I’m glad you referenced C. Z. in your article as the “originator” for the image replacement code. I spoke with him after the late-summer hoopla regarding image replacement, and he was surprised that I actually took the time to figure out he was the first.

As for the holy-grail of image replacement — complately semantic, totally accessible, and usable for those with images turned off — I don’t believe it has been developed yet. CSS implementation on the world’s most popular browser will forever limit us, and until CSS3 content rules work in IE, the holy grail will stay hidden.

posted at 02:34 pm on October 22, 2003 by Mike

15 "Screen Reader" versus "Aural Rendering Engine"

Correct me if I’m mistaken, but isn’t a screen reader, in difference from an aural rendering engine, supposed to represent what is displayed on screen? An aural rendering engine would try to render the page in aural media, and naturally also handle aural stylesheets and not be affected by screen stylesheets, but shouldn’t a screen reader just try to represent the visual data in aural format? Thus, an image might be represented by it’s alternative text which is made for medias where it can’t be displayed, but the stylesheets for screen should still apply.

posted at 02:42 pm on October 22, 2003 by liorean

16 w3 to do's and multi modal

Is a screen reader an aural device, yes?! then it should work with aural stylesheets but it does not. If it did then we could style it with one style for screen readers (aural) and one for browsers (screen). Great article Joe. The FIR technique is a great study to make us think. W3 and screen readers please get together before the next recommendation. W3 we may really need multimodal devices but what if the style sheets conflict in implementation? Keep it simple – keep it seperate I rekon. But to be sure we need user testing. This needs scientific research – maybe a university could start. Testing, testing, one, two, three, come in, over.

posted at 02:56 pm on October 22, 2003 by Kliertje

17 FIR, FEAR, FIRE...

This css hack could lead a search engin to consider your document as hidden keyword Spamdexing.

Accessibility appart, i really think it’s a bad usage of css :

- First, it sounds like a repetition of the alt or longdesc well know alt’s img attributes combined with a css.

- Second, sometimes you have to break words in part, wich mean nothing or bring noise in your speech, goat and boat could be a good sample of nonsens (in cas of first-letter).

- Third, you have to double tag and by the way bring weight for nothing.

In conclusion, accessibility, search engine misinterpretation, repetition, noise and weight don’t make me think this is a usable css hacks, but let me ask another question…

What about svg ?

posted at 05:33 pm on October 22, 2003 by Boris Meyer

18 Small text method

A method i have been using is to shrink the text down to a pixel and colour it the same as the image (a CSS background). Of course this will only work with certain images and non I.E browsers can resize the text. I have used this method on my department’s intranet — “standardized” to I.E. with a few rogue Mac users (me included), so it is a bit of a controlled system.
The upside of this is the text is not hidden but just teeny-tiny so it should still be read by a screen reader.
Anyway, it is at least another trick in the bag.

posted at 06:15 pm on October 22, 2003 by Gavin jacobi

19 re: FIR, FEAR, FIRE...

FIR, FEAR, FIRE… | by Boris Meyer
>This css hack could lead a search engine to consider your document
>as hidden keyword Spamdexing.

This might be true once SE spiders interpret css,
then it would apply to any other css technique hiding text as well,
making most of css driven nav systems or pure fancy effects spamdexing.

I don’t think SEs could afford to cripple designer’s css options to that extend;
punishing font coloured the same as the containing element’s background in ye olden times
didn’t harm designer’s choices as this method hasn’t any conceivable benefit regarding
layout and design. (except for very sloppy and inept coders)

Instead, a more sensible approach would be to simply ignore hidden text for indexing;
in fact most of spamdexing nowadays doesn’t relay on hiding text but of link farms whose
visible text qualifies as spam because of it’s semantics.
(or lack thereof to human readers,
spammers don’t care much about that, it’s not meant to be read by humans)

Concluding,
hunting for spamdexing will force SE’s to rely on semantic analysis,
hiding text by css (or script) should be harmless in times to come,
as for now, I haven’t heard of css parsing bots.

An ~~hopefully~~ educated guess,
Marek Moehling

posted at 09:47 pm on October 22, 2003 by Marek Moehling