Microsoft Office Live Small Business Community

It would be really nifty if there was a place in the hyperlink dialog box that you could add some alt text to the links.

Amen!  It's the only piece missing from image links.  It would eliminate the need for HTML modules altogether for this purpose.  Perhaps another way to do it would be to attach it somehow in the image gallery, possibly during upload.  Then it would be available for all images, not just links.

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I would be in heaven if not only could I add alt text but if it would also be visible to the search engines that would be fantastic. currently any content, and I do mean anything, that is added to the page using a html module is completely invisible to the search engines.

Gary
New Mountain Tavern		Silver Moon Furniture

I may be out of my league here, but for images..... Since I have almost 1000 of them, I keep a folder on my computer which is a mirror of my image gallery so that I have the exact filenames to insert into the following shortcut.  That way instead of having to wait for all the thumbnails to load in order to insert an image.....  I just edit and paste the following which includes the image alt text directly into the page where I want the image.

<IMG src="http://YOURDOMAIN.com/images/FILENAME.jpg" alt="ALT TEXT GOES HERE">

Hey katnrick,

That's exactly how you can get around the ALT text issue!  But one thing to note for anyone doing this is that you cannot change the ALT text again. If you want to change the ALT text, you will need to delete the old image and then reinsert it again using cut and paste with the changes.

Royster

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I had tried this a while ago and again when I read this post, figuring I had just done it wrong.  It appears to work in the page editor, the alt text is there when I hover over the image.  When I view my site - the alt text is not there.  If I close the page editor and return later, alt text isn't there anymore in the page editor.

Since alt text is probably the most basic assessibility attribute, Microsoft ought to be embarrassed that it hasn't added it to Office Live yet.

Hey sjr, 

Appears that you are spot on about working in Page Editor and not Live. Anyway, it's back to my trusty Custom Module technique to get around this. Create a Custom Footer on your page, and delete everything in the box and add the following in:

 <xsl:stylesheet xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform" version="1.0">
  <xsl:output method="html" />
  <xsl:template match="/Footer">

<IMG src="http://YOURDOMAIN.com/images/FILENAME.jpg" alt="ALT TEXT GOES HERE" />

  </xsl:template>
</xsl:stylesheet>

Save and view. You should be able to see your ALT text. And this is fully indexable by search engines because it's part of your page and not stuck in an IFRAME.

Royster 

Get a free .biz domain for your website. Visit SoftPrizm.com

Blog: The SoftPrizm Channel

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Sorry Sue,

Open mouth, insert foot.  I use that to manually insert images instead of waiting for the image gallery to load each time.  I would have bet money that it had worked in the past and carp, it doesn't now.  I know, or thought I knew, that I had "viewed source" of pages in the past and saw the alt text there.  Now, it's no longer there.

Again, sorry... but I do know what my foot tastes like.

A easy way to tell if your different techniques are successful in making it possible for the search engines to see your alt tags is just go to the webpage analyzer of your choice and look. for me the only alt tag that is visible to the search engines is:

microsoft office live small business get a free website and more - 1

Gary
New Mountain Tavern		Silver Moon Furniture

An even better and faster way is to look at the HTML source of the webpage and search for the ALT tag.

Royster

Get a free .biz domain for your website. Visit SoftPrizm.com

Blog: The SoftPrizm Channel

OLSecure Beta: Secured Web Area Solution for Office Live

royster:

Anyway, it's back to my trusty Custom Module technique to get around this

That sure is a handy, dandy technique.  Good for everything, slices, dices and probably mows the lawn too. <g>