Douglas Bowman — Using Background-Image to Replace Text:
In principle, the method is very simple. You might even kick yourself when you realize just how simple. We write a short string of text (eg. “Hello world!”) and surround it with two sets of basic HTML tags. Then we use CSS to hide the HTML text and display a background image containing the exact same words instead of the original text. That’s it. Replacing text with an image is no more complicated than this.
I’ve recently used this technique on a site I designed, Phoenix Classics.