Fly Software has launched Alt&Title, a Windows application that automatically adds missing alt and title attributes to applicable HTML tags.
Alt&Title was developed to primarily help Web developers address the problem of missing tooltips in Internet Explorer 8 and Firefox. These browsers, unlike earlier versions of Internet Explorer, do not use the alt attribute to display a tooltip for page elements such as images and areas. Instead, the title attribute is used for this important visual cue.
“Using the alt attribute for displaying tooltips has been a common misconception for years,” states James Davis, Marketing Coordinator for Fly Software. “With the launch of Internet Explorer 8 and the increased popularity of Firefox, missing tooltips has become a conspicuous problem that many developers need to address.”
If a developer’s portfolio stretches to hundreds or thousands of web pages, manually locating and adding missing title attributes would be an extremely time-consuming and costly process. Alt&Title solves this by providing a quick and convenient way to correct any number of web pages at the click of a button.
Alt&Title scans web pages and automatically adds a title attribute to supported HTML tags that already contain an alt attribute, and vice versa. This means, if a HTML tag contains alt=“Download Now!”, then title=”Download Now!” is added. Similarly, if title=”Buy Now” is already present, then alt=”Buy Now” is added.
Image (img), area and image input tags are supported, as are a wide range of web page formats including html, asp, aspx, php, and even Dreamweaver templates.
Full reporting is also provided to enable users to review problematic HTML tags, including the page and line number where they appear and the attribute content already present or applied.
“Not only does Alt&Title allow developers to quickly correct existing web pages, it also helps them reduce development time on current projects,” comments James. “Developers now only need to add either an alt attribute or a title attribute to applicable HTML tags and use Alt&Title to add the other. This is especially useful for users of Dreamweaver who can only use its GUI to add an alt attribute to images, areas and image inputs.”
Even Fly Software’s own Web developer, Darren Eastwood, has benefitted from using Alt&Title. “Mistakenly I only added alt attributes to my images, and as a result, tooltips were not appearing in IE8 and Firefox.” states Darren. “I estimated it would take approximately five hours for me to manually add corresponding title attributes. Using Alt&Title it took just five minutes!”
