JustSo Alt Tagger utility

Accessibility has become an important aspect of website design. Until recently most of us pretty much ignored adding Alt and Title tags to each image, and now have hundreds of pages whose images are missing their tags, degrading our w3c compliance. This Dreamweaver Command will allow you to automatically update these pages. Unlike some similar Extensions I have seen, this one will work on Template-based pages, and offers several options, including working on just one document or all those currently selected in the site window or even the entire site all at once. And now it will allow the creation of empty attributes, like title="" when you do not want to apply the attribute but do want to be compliant!

As with any utility which updates your files, it is wise to make a safe, off-site backup first, just to be safe.

EMAIL ME TO PURCHASE THIS EXTENSION.

How-to use:

Open a document on your Site, and then select "JustSo Alt Tagger" from the Commands/Valleywebdesigns.com menu. This will open its User Interface, which is quite straightforward.

 

 

---

 

Make each image's
Alt and Title
attributes =

You can choose either:

Its filename - the filename is made prettier - its extension is removed, underscores (_) are converted to spaces and the first letter of each resulting word is capitalized. So "empire_state_building_view_east.jpg" is displayed as "Empire State Building View East"

or

This text - Enter any text that you would like for the alt and title attributes. If you wish the attributes to be blank, then simply leave the textbox blank! (to create an empty attribute like Title="")

or

Blank - This will make alt="" and title="" attributes for the images.

Do this:

Always - any existing Alt and Title attributes will be overwritten.

or

Only when image has no Alt or Title (or it is blank) - if the image has Non-Null alt and/or title attributes then they are left intact and not overwritten. - so note that blank attributes (e.g. alt="") ARE overwritten as if they were missing.

In these files:

TIP: If you are going to work on a site-wide basis, be certain the SITE displayed is correct before proceeding.

Here you choose the scope on which you wish to apply the changes. If your favorite filetype is missing from those listed here, I will add them for you - just let me know. You will be warned before proceeding - but do remember that changes made to closed documents can not be undone!

TIP: In MX2004 and DW8, if you choose to update many files at once - it is best first to disable the DW menu option File/Open Recent/Reopen documents on startup. Or else they will all open the next time you restart DW!

Make no changes to these images:

Here you may add any number of complete imagenames, just separate each of them by a semicolon (;). These need not be only shim image names, but might be a special image that for some reason you want not to have an alt applied. Careful if you Browse as that one filename will overwrite the others on the list!

However DO add alt="" and title="" if the attributes are absent - To improve your page's w3c compliance, you might want to add blank alt and title attributes even to your shim images. Blank attributes will not be added if there are not already attributes present, so special values you might have added are safe.

 

That's all there is to it!