Usability is one of the most overlooked aspects of good web design.
I love going to the site TED.com and watching the lectures of some of the most brilliant minds living today. For a site that delivers Informative, Inspiring, and fascinating lectures they need to make sure their web sites’ usability is held to the same standards as their speakers.
When I see a talk by a speaker that I would listen to no matter what the topic is, such as Al Gore, Tim Berners-Lee, Julia Sweeney, or J.J. Abrams, I click through to the video and enjoy, but I am not familiar with everyone that lectures at TED, so there is need to see what the topic of the talk is before I click through. Now when I do click through the entire title of the talk is revealed, but if I am not interested I have to click the back button and I shouldn’t have to. That is why there are ALT tags.
TED.com - Truncated Titles AND ALT tags?
You will notice in this screen shot of the TED.com site they truncate some of the titles of the talks with ellipsis (the worst culprits shown with red arrows), which is fine if you provide the entire title in the ALT tag, but they don’t, they give you the same truncated description. On this particular day half the talks to me are a mystery with such titles as: “Katherine Fulton: You are the…”, or “Philip Zimbardo prescribes a…”, and “Paul Collier’s new rules for…”.
New rules for WHAT?
You are the WHAT?
WHAT are you prescribing Phil?
This is a cousin to mystery meat navigation where the user has to guess at what they are clicking through to. Again, wouldn’t be that bad if I could hover over the link to see the full title, and why they don’t include the full title in the ALT tag is beyond me.
Remember when you truncate links or titles to articles, make sure your ALT tag gives the full description, that is what they are there for. They are also for the handicapped, but I guess in this case all of us are handicapped when it comes to figuring out what these talks are about.
Another quick example off the top of my head is at ABC.com where they allow you to watch their shows online. When I open up their player and chose the show “What Would You Do?” I found each episodes summery a description of the concept for the show as a whole, but not actual details on what each episode contains. Even though this ABC player is in Flash I am considering these roll over descriptions alt tags and it just repeats the same text for each episode. Now I believe some of their shows like LOST do give summaries for each episode, but it shouldn’t be hard to do it right for all the content.
Trust me your users will thank you for it.