Special Application GIFs

This is an example of placing quite a long passage of text in the ALT section of the IMG tag that calls a transparent GIF. The idea is that this text will be available to a special browser which has a speech synthesiser attached to it. Maybe it will become the practice that many web pages carry additional information in this manner for users who are blind.
You are welcome to copy all of the GIF files that are used on this page and use them on your own web pages if you so wish. The files are listed below and a link is provided to each to assist in downloading. Apart from the background GIF, all of the files are totally transparent. The special application is that they can be used to provide information in the ALT section of the IMG tag that calls them without disrupting the display, so that users who are blind and who are using a speech synthesiser may hear additional text that is included for their benefit. Depending on your browser the ALT text may appear in a box on the screen if you rest your mouse over the transparent GIF. All three transparent GIFs are, in fact, applied as examples on this page, hopefully demonstrating their unobtrusiveness in use. The transparent GIF that is only one pixel high can be hard to find by using a mouse, particularly as the mouse may need to dwell on the point for a few seconds before the message appears. However, in an application the user is not intended to look for the text behind the transparent GIFs with a mouse as it is intended as input to a speech synthesiser.

The text in the ALT section of this IMG tag would need to take up more space to display than does the graphic that carries it with it, for this transparent GIF is 500 pixels wide by only one pixel high!
 
Transparent GIF, 500 pixels wide by 1 pixel high.
  		sp500001.gif
 
Transparent GIF, 500 pixels wide by 10 pixels high.
  		sp500010.gif
 
Transparent GIF, 500 pixels wide by 20 pixels high.
  		sp500020.gif
 
Background GIF, 800 pixels wide by 75 pixels high.
  		spec9000.gif

27 June 1998
This transparent GIF rounds off the page.