FIR is just a hack to make our CSS “pure” by seperating images (which are style) from our content, while still making the content of the image (usually text) available to people using screenreaders. Lame, ugly, and a hassle – all for the sake of fickle “purity”.
CSS 3 is more capable of seperating eye-candy images from content, so I intend to use old-fashioned <img> tags until CSS3 is widely supported.
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Shakey
Just an aside…
While all this discuss on FIR is very interesting and useful, the biggest issue I can see with FIR is a purely design one: images are not fluid in size like text is.
The image is going to stay the same size when you resize the text using the browser’s text size (unless some doofus has used pixel font sizes in IE) so the beautiful design work which required FIR in the first place is going to break down the moment a user wants to view bigger/smaller text.
Purely based on that I’m going to stick with text for text ;)
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Charles
There may well be a lot of issues which reveal themselves after testing on screen readers. For example, at least one release of Jaws 4 does not read the contents of the alt attribute if a graphich is smaller than 10×1 or 1×10.
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Charles
To clarify, the non-reading of the alt attribute on small graphics was an intentional feature of that release of Jaws 4. Since I don’t have access to Jaws 5, I don’t know whether it is still a feature.
(As to why someone would do this, we use small transparent graphics with alt attributes to provide instructions to be read by screen readers, but which are not visible to sighted users, such as “skip navigation” or “content begins here”.)
It is also not sufficient to ask someone to test a page in their screen reader using their settings. Jaws (and possibly other screen readers) offers a choice of modes for reading the page, at least two (one is called Virtual Cursor Mode). The different modes may give different results for specific coding techniques. So this actually multiplies the number of tests one must do.
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FIR is just a hack to make our CSS “pure” by seperating images (which are style) from our content, while still making the content of the image (usually text) available to people using screenreaders. Lame, ugly, and a hassle – all for the sake of fickle “purity”.
CSS 3 is more capable of seperating eye-candy images from content, so I intend to use old-fashioned <img> tags until CSS3 is widely supported.
Shakey
Just an aside…
While all this discuss on FIR is very interesting and useful, the biggest issue I can see with FIR is a purely design one: images are not fluid in size like text is.
The image is going to stay the same size when you resize the text using the browser’s text size (unless some doofus has used pixel font sizes in IE) so the beautiful design work which required FIR in the first place is going to break down the moment a user wants to view bigger/smaller text.
Purely based on that I’m going to stick with text for text ;)
Charles
There may well be a lot of issues which reveal themselves after testing on screen readers. For example, at least one release of Jaws 4 does not read the contents of the alt attribute if a graphich is smaller than 10×1 or 1×10.
Charles
To clarify, the non-reading of the alt attribute on small graphics was an intentional feature of that release of Jaws 4. Since I don’t have access to Jaws 5, I don’t know whether it is still a feature.
(As to why someone would do this, we use small transparent graphics with alt attributes to provide instructions to be read by screen readers, but which are not visible to sighted users, such as “skip navigation” or “content begins here”.)
It is also not sufficient to ask someone to test a page in their screen reader using their settings. Jaws (and possibly other screen readers) offers a choice of modes for reading the page, at least two (one is called Virtual Cursor Mode). The different modes may give different results for specific coding techniques. So this actually multiplies the number of tests one must do.