area elements of image maps See Understanding Techniques for WCAG Success Criteria for important information about the usage of these informative techniques and how they relate to the normative WCAG 2.0 success criteria. The Applicability section explains the scope of the technique, and the presence of techniques for a specific technology does not imply that the technology can be used in all situations to create content that meets WCAG 2.0.
HTML and XHTML Documents that contain area elements.
This technique relates to:
The objective of this technique is to provide text alternatives that serve the same
purpose as the selectable regions of an image map. An image map is an image divided into
selectable regions defined by area elements. Each area is a link to another
Web page or another part of the current Web page. The alt attribute of each
area element serves the same purpose as the selectable area of the
image.
This example uses the alt attribute of the area element
to provide text that describes the purpose of the image map areas.
Example Code:
<img src="welcome.gif" usemap="#map1"
alt="Areas in the library. Select an area for
more information on that area." />
<map id="map1" name="map1">
<area shape="rect" coords="0,0,30,30"
href="reference.html" alt="Reference" />
<area shape="rect" coords="34,34,100,100"
href="media.html" alt="Audio visual lab" />
</map> Resources are for information purposes only, no endorsement implied.
For each area element in an image map:
Check that the area element has an alt attribute.
Check that the text alternative specified by the alt attribute serves the same
purpose as the part of image map image referenced by the area element
of the imagemap.
The above checks are true.
If this is a sufficient technique for a success criterion, failing this test procedure does not necessarily mean that the success criterion has not been satisfied in some other way, only that this technique has not been successfully implemented and can not be used to claim conformance.