Doctor, I think my purity is burgeoning

[deborah]

How much time do I spend singing the praises of interlibrary loan? Because of ILL, my coworkers and I are currently passing around the marvelous Protected by the Prince, an absolutely terrible Harlequin about the Prince of Lusitanalpsvillia (or something) and a mousy, bespectacled archivist.

This LOLcats version of the book (irritatingly lacking alt text; come on, people, get with the program) is actually a pretty accurate rendition of the plot, and possibly better written. ArchivesNext is running a hilarious quiz/contest about the book and its premise.

ROFLMAO.

Edited to add: Rebecca at Derangement and Description, creator of the LOLcats comic, is going to be adding transcript or some kind of alt. Given that I rather gracelessly snarked in public instead of privately asking her to add alternative text, this is my public apology and recognition of her coolness.

Comments

[libskrat]

I'll bug D&D about the alt text.

[deborah]

thank you so much.

alt text

[derangementanddescription.wordpress.com]

Fair complaint about the alt-text. What's the best way to get it in for such a long comic?

--Rebecca

Re: alt text

[deborah]

thank you so much for being willing to do put an alternative text!

Technically, for a long description, the standards say that you should use the longdesc attribute to link to an external page with the transcript. But because longdesc has only partial support (basically, unless you use JAWS you have no access to it, so it's inaccessible to people with other screenreaders or people using visual browsers with images off), the folks at WebAIM suggest using an explicit text link to a transcript page, with or without the same link being provided via longdesc. Then all the alt text has to say is "lolcats comic" or some such.

Thank you so much. And also, the comic is hilarious.

Re: alt text

[derangementanddescription.wordpress.com]

Hmm. What if I put a link to a txt file after the comic? Would that make the screen readers happy? (I am thinking about alt text more broadly--HTML pages will not work so well for transcripts of EAD comics.)

Re: alt text

[deborah]

yes, I definitely think that would make screen readers happy. I just tested it with NVDA, and plain text files in browsers read just fine.

And oh, your EAD comics would translate so well to plaintext, because you don't need to see any of the image to get the joke!