Controlling How PopChart Server Describes a PopChart Image

Besides data, there are three aspects of descriptive text that you can dynamically control—the title, an object's manual description paragraph, and whether or not certain features (like drill-down and PopUp) or objects are translated into descriptive text. If you are more adventurous, you can also customize PopChart Server's descriptive text template. This is discussed in the next section.

Setting the Title of Your Descriptive Text

When PopChart Server generates descriptive text, it looks for a text box named title. The contents of this textbox will be used for the title that appears at the top of the descriptive text page. If you add a title box using the PopChart Wizard, this box will be set automatically. Otherwise, you will need to change the object name of the text box that contains the title of your PopChart image.

Instructions on setting the title box can be found in "Title Text Box" in Chapter 1 of the PopChart Builder User Guide.

Of course, you can change the contents of your title box in PCScript at any time using the title. SetText() method. For example, to set the title to Interesting Data, you would use the following command.

title.setText(Interesting Data)

If you cannot, or do not wish to set a title box, or if you wish to override the title box, you can also use the Main. Title() PCScript command. For example, to set the title for your descriptive text to Descriptive Text for Interesting Data, you would use the following command.

Main.title(Descriptive Text for Interesting Data)

Manually Adding a Description Paragraph to an Object

Sometimes, you may want to offer your visually impaired viewers additional information about an object. In such circumstances, you can manually add descriptive text using the main. Description(), graph. Description(), and textbox. Description() PCScript commands. These commands add a paragraph of text immediately above the automatically generated description for your PopChart, graph, or text box, respectively.

For example, suppose you wanted to add the following text above the automatically generated description for your graph object: This bar graph compares sales statistics for the period between May 12th and June 30th. You could add this text with the following command.

graph.Description(This bar graph compares sales statistics for the period between May 12th and June 30th)

Suppressing objects are Special Effects

You can suppress all automatically generated text description for any graph or text box by using the graph. SuppressAutoDescription() and textbox. SuppressAutoDescription() commands respectively. You can also suppress automatically generated descriptive text for the entire PopChart with the Main. SuppressAutoDescription() command.

Note: When you suppress automatically generated text description for an object, text entered via the object's Description() method will still be shown.

By default, PopChart Server will generate descriptive text for PopUp text and drill-down effects. If you need to suppress the description for these items, you can use graph. SuppressDescriptionItem() and textbox. SuppressDescriptionItem().

For example, if you wanted to suppress descriptive text for all drill-down effects in a graph, you could use the following PCScript command.

graph.SuppressDescriptionItem(_Drilldown_)

You can pass as a parameter to this function any of the following values: _Drilldown_, _Popup_, _CatDrilldown_, _SeriesDrilldown_. Choosing _CatDrilldown_ will suppress descriptive text for drill-down effects on category labels. Choosing _Drilldown_ will suppress descriptive text for all drill-down effects. Choosing _PopUp_ will suppress descriptive text for PopUp text. Choosing _SeriesDrillDown_ will suppress descriptive text for drill-down effects on series labels.