Editing or inserting ALT Attribute for Image

[drdick]

I'm using cpanel (hosted by Heritage web Design). I have a PHP gallery on my website. I am told by Heritage there is no way to put ALT Attributes on my images. I am a veterinarian who cares for lots of guide dogs. My blind clients have asked me to put ALT attributes on my images. Heritage tells me for $500.00 I can change the gallery type and be able to do that. Seems like a pretty basic thing to do (put in ALT attributes) and it would seem like it should be doable with cpanel.

Is there a way to do it through cpanel??

Thank you very much

Dick G.

[Infopro]

You should be able to edit your code from the File Manager in cPanel easy enough. Or use a good html editing application.

Your host sounds like he's asking for a lot of money for something that should be done by default in most galleries. I had a peek at their website and only see a flash gallery offered, doing anything in flash does require more work and knowledge.

Many hosts these days offer several forms of free galleries you can click to install and upload your images quite easily. Since you don't mention what gallery you're using, not really sure how the question can be answered properly.

If your host wants to charge you for everything he helps you with, it might be wise to find a new one that doesn't.

[drdick]

They told me it was a "php gallery". I'm a dog doctor so I have no clue what that actually means. I can't seem to figure out how to get to the properties of the images to put the alt text into the field. Here's a link to one of the galleries (Which was not FREE!) on my web site ... maybe you can tell what it is and advise me on how to put in alt text.
sunnycrestanimalcare.com/childrens_gallery.html
Thanks again for the help. Really appreciate it.

dick

[drdick]

Thanks for taking the time to look. They called me back this morning from Heritage and told me the modified the captions.txt file so I can use it for alt codes. I did the first page in my client review gallery and it seems to work most of the time.

I don't know how to confirm that what I'm seeing when I mouse over the image is actually and ALT attribute that search engines will see. Hope it is.

I do like cPanel but it would be nice if I could edit keywords and headings, etc. I'm locked out from doing that it seems.

Regards,
dick

[Infopro]

Well I'm not sure I'm any help at all. Your host should be able to assist with something like this easy enough, if they made it though.

No clue who makes that gallery, it does have code in it from dynamicdrivedotcom and this small bit that gives us a hint; (InstanceBegin template="/Templates/default5.dwt") assuming URL="http://www.fileinfo.com/extension/dwt"].dwt[/URL] means dreamweaver template. Adobe - Dreamweaver Developer Center

The gallery already has alt tags in place. On the main page there are alt texts, but it's just pulling the image name. When you click an image for popup the alt tag is there still, but empty. So, when they say this:

I am told by Heritage there is no way to put ALT Attributes on my images.

someone's not giving it to you straight.

IMO, if they can have it call an image name for the alt text on the main page, they could at least, add the same code to the popup page to pull the image name in the alt tag there as well.

Anyway, had a few minutes to kill. Sorry can't help more than that

This isn't a cPanel issue though, you'd need to speak to your gallery coder or host about this for help. Or, find a more robust gallery to use from somewhere else that you'll have full control over.

[Infopro]

Originally Posted by drdick

Thanks for taking the time to look. They called me back this morning from Heritage and told me the modified the captions.txt file so I can use it for alt codes. I did the first page in my client review gallery and it seems to work most of the time.

I don't know how to confirm that what I'm seeing when I mouse over the image is actually and ALT attribute that search engines will see. Hope it is.

The ones that end in .jpg are not the correct alt tags, if that helps.

Originally Posted by drdick

I do like cPanel but it would be nice if I could edit keywords and headings, etc. I'm locked out from doing that it seems.

Regards,
dick

Probably not. But if you're not sure what you're doing you could make a mess I'm sure.

If you open cPanel File Manager and navigate to public_html, click once on the index.html then click edit, you should see your main page's html to do with what you like. Same on the gallery, find the client_gallery.html and open it in the editor. That's your gallery page of course.

You might want to check your pages here The W3C CSS Validation Service and here The W3C Markup Validation Service as well. Fixing a few of those can help your site work it's best for bots and guests.

Best of luck to you.

[drdick]

I did that validation after Heritage did the website and asked them to fix all the errors. Just checked again and there are still 18 errors. I noticed since I started using Google Chrome formatting is not right when using that browser. Thanks for all the good advice. I'll see if I can get heritage to fix the errors again.

[drdick]

Looks like the edit button is disabled by my host. I click on it and nothing happens. guess they are protecting me from myself<G>

[drdick]

It doesn't work for the gallery but it does work for the index file. I started with the gallery since I didn't want to mess up anything major. I think I'm safe taking out a few keywords since I'm told I have too many.

Again thanks for all the help...if you ever have any pet questions I hope I can reciprocate!

Dick

[Spiral]

Dick:

If you read my posts, you'll see that I am extremely busy not only with
my own business schedule and regular life but I also spend a great deal of
time helping a lot of people on here and at other sites as much as I can.

I cannot guarantee a lot of free time but if you ask me, I'll take a look
at your server when I can and help you insert your ALT tags without the
$500 that your provider is asking you (that's ridiculous incidentally!)

Alt tags (alternate text descriptions) are very easy to add as far as
basic HTML is concerned and only a little more complex when dealing
with dynamic content but the underlying output generation is basically
the same as regular static pages and goes something like this:

Original Image:

<img src="/path/image.jpg" width="xxx" height="yyy">

ALT Added Image:

<img src="/path/image.jpg" width="xxx" height="yyy" alt="My Image Text">

As someone pointed out here, they already added "ALT" images to your
image files, just filled in the "alt=" tags with the filenames instead of
a more descriptive message. That would suggest that you can indeed
add ALT tags to your images.

Call it more a case of laziness not wanting to synchronize which picture
goes with which ALT tag or just greed wanting more money than reasonable
for what is not really that difficult of a task but either way, your provider
is asking too high a price tag to insert those for you.

Most image gallery scripts actually have built in support for ALT tags
and though I didn't see what you were using underlying with the sample
URL you provided, your comments suggest you may be using one of the
standard image gallery programs as PHP Gallery, PHP Album, 4 Images, and
Coppermine are all photo gallery programs written in PHP and all of those
have ALT tag descriptions control built right into the menu interface
to make managing ALT tags ridiculously easy plus all of these programs
are open source or similar and are free programs and don't cost anything
to install, setup, or operate. In fact all of these can be installed fully
automatically from a popular 3rd party Cpanel extension called Fantastico
and some of these can also be installed automatically directly from
Cpanel alone without the need for any additional program. All of these
can also be downloaded and installed manually as well and are very
easy to install so if your provider charged you heavily to install your
image gallery, you have definitely been taken for a ride.

[drdick]

I really appreciate your offer to help me. With the kind help from this forum I may have figured out how to get the alt attributes in ... it's a bit cumbersome since I have so many but it is doable.

I found a file in the gallery directory called index.php. I found a setting in there:

$text_display = "caption";
/*
Options are "alt", "filename", "caption", and "none" to determine what text displays underneath the
thumbnail image. If set to "caption," the text will be taken from the file "captions.txt" in
the image directory. That file should have one caption per line, with each line formatted
as filename|caption, as follows:


I changed the value from "caption" to "alt".

There is another file called captions.txt. which had a sample in it. The format is:
filename|alt text goes here.

It seems to work because now when I run the mouse over the image I see what I put in the captions.txt file.

The Big Question I have is: Will the search engines see these alt atributes if they are in a php gallery? The reason I ask is because when I run those free SEO tools and the results come up the number of images found is WAY less than the number I have.

Next project is to find out why my formatting is weird in Chrome but ok in Mozilla and Explorer.

Thanks for the help.

[Spiral]

Originally Posted by drdick

The Big Question I have is: Will the search engines see these alt atributes if they are in a php gallery? The reason I ask is because when I run those free SEO tools and the results come up the number of images found is WAY less than the number I have.

Yes absolutely! Contrary to popular belief, the search engines don't
really tell any difference between static or dynamic content and will
index your pages and embedded text like ALT tags irregardless.

It does not matter how the pages are actually built behind the scenes.

What does matter is if your pages are behind some sort of password
protection or user authentication or openly viewable by the public
as this does make a difference on search engine indexing.

(I should know since I wrote one of the major engine crawling robots )

Now regarding what is listed in the engines, it takes a little while for
your site to be re-crawled and updated by the various search engines
and depending on your submission methods, how many people search
for keywords that may be relevant to your site, and other factors,
it may take anywhere from a few days to six months before the
search engines have the new information from your ALT tags.

If you are using submission tools, I would go ahead and re-submit
your site and also do a few searches for your site in place like Google
and others to go ahead and get the process started.

[drdick]

Thanks for that information. I'd hate to think I was spending all this time on the ALT attributes for nothing.

Any other tips would be appreciated. I'll resubmit. When I searched images for Sunnycrest some of the client reviews I just put in the alt attribute are coming up already.

Really appreciate the help.

[drdick]

Since ALT Attributes don't show up in Chrome or Firefox do I need to try to change it to a TITLE? If I do that do the search engines still see the text I put in?

Sorry for the "lame" questions!

[drdick]

Could I use "caption" instead of "title"? Are they the same thing?

Thanks again