Accessible org charts

[Daz]

I'm currently working on trasnferring a set of organisation charts onto a site template. Fortunately the people who designed the site came up with graphics for each org chart so I decided to resize each one so it'd fit the template. When I resized I then had to implement a bit of js to enlarge each box in the chart on mouseover, you can see the test of it here

http://www2.dfpni.gov.uk/rpa/index.htm

Each box will link into another page which extracts a relative record from a db. Now the irony of this job is that although their site currently makes no use of alt whatsoever now they're concerned about it! What's the best way of me making this more accessible. They don't want alt used unless I can supress the tooltip but what I leave alt="" and use the title attribute or longdesc, will this benefit screen readers?

[anode]

Too bad SVG isn't more widespread or it would be perfect for this.

[Daz]

I posted about the problem of doing this charts here - http://www.sitepointforums.com/showt...hreadid=103572 - redux mentioned SVG and I just noticed his suggested solution, sorry m8! Anyway, what is SVG??

[anode]

http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2001/03/21/svg.html

[redux]

as a short-term solution, use longdesc (and also provide the [D] link straight afterwards, as i don't think any browser at this stage directly supports longdesc)

[Daz]

Yes I think that's the route I'm going to have to take. Here's a slight problem which is diversing into css.
The org charts I have sliced up so if I insert a [d] after an image it'll knock out the alignment of the images. Is there any css technique I can use to position the [d] below the image acting like a layer on top of the table so it doesn't affect the slices?

[redux]

aeh...is each slice a self-contained piece of chart ? if not, i would strongly question why it would be sliced up in the first place...

[Daz]

Almost each box in each chart links to a page which extracts info from a db, that's why I sliced the image up. Go see - http://www2.dfpni.gov.uk/rpa/dard.htm

[redux]

sorry, missed that link the first time around...
i think you should save yourself a lot of trouble trying to make this page accessible, and create an alternative page with the textual description. add a link to the graphical page along the lines of "see the organisation chart in text format" or something. the page itself is so heavily biased towards visual / design presentation, that i don't think there's an easy way to magically make it accessible.

[Daz]

I agree with you but I'm kinda stuck between the devil and the deep blue sea here. Representing the chart in a text only page will only create more work, it'll be hard to represent hierachy. There will be a lot of extra explanatory text, that's not something I'm going to do and I can't see the customer volunteering either!

One other solution would be to add a graphic [d] below each box on the original image and reslice it. It's a lot of extra work tho which is why I asked could I use some sort of css trick to float the [d] so that it's not part of the table and knock out the images.