Fixing 403 Forbidden on alias directory with Apache

I am trying to setup an alias to point to some directory on my filesystem not in DocumentRoot. Now I get a 403 Forbidden response. These are the steps taken: 1. edit http.conf, adding:

Alias /example "/Users/user/Documents/example"

then...

<Directory "/Users/user/Documents/example">
   Options Indexes FollowSymLinks MultiViews
   AllowOverride None
   Order allow,deny
   Allow from all</Directory>

2. setting permissions with chmod in terminal:

chmod 755 /Users/user/Documents/example

Now it should work? instead I get the access forbidden. This is the output from error_log:

[Sun Jul 24 06:57:57 2011] [error] [client xx.xx.xx.xx] (13)Permission denied: access to /example denied