Tips

• I describe image replacement here because I think it's important to understand the basic concept. Perhaps it will evolve to overcome the obstacles that keep it from complete acceptance.

• One of the advantages of FIR is that because the header text does exist, search engines will see it in the source code, even though your visitors will not.

• One problem with image replacement is that screen readers like JAWS sometimes can't read the spanned text. Importing the CSS for screen only (which translates to computer browsers, not screen readers) helps solve that problem.

• A second problem arises if a visitor uses a browser that does not support CSS (perhaps a mobile browser) and has images turned off. In that case, they will see neither the image nor the text it was meant to replace.

• There are a number of additional image replacement techniques that have attempted to solve the accessibility issues. Some are discussed by Dave Shea in his article defending FIR, http://www.digital-web.com/articles/in_defense_of_fahrner_image_replacement/ and in his and Molly Holzschlag's book, The Zen of CSS Design, whose signature Web site relies heavily on image replacement. Another source of alternative techniques is the original article by Douglas Bowman popularizing FIR: http://www.stopdesign.com/articles/replace_text/, in particular the notes at the end. Finally, you may also want to read Joe Clark's criticisms of FIR at A List Apart, http://www.alistapart.com/articles/fir for the other side of the argument.