- From: David Singer <singer@apple.com>
- Date: Mon, 26 Apr 2010 09:57:54 -0700
- To: Laura Carlson <laura.lee.carlson@gmail.com>
- Cc: Ian Hickson <ian@hixie.ch>, Matt Morgan-May <mattmay@adobe.com>, HTML Accessibility Task Force <public-html-a11y@w3.org>
On Apr 22, 2010, at 23:18 , Laura Carlson wrote: > Hi all, > > Thanks to everyone who completed the "Call for Consensus: Text > Alternatives" survey [1]. > > I am especially grateful to Dave and Ian for your comments. They are > points that need discussion and consideration. Thank you. > > Dave commented on the survey: > >> A) The replacement text falls far short of the editorial quality of the text it replaces. > > Any suggestions for improvement? I'd really appreciate help from you > or anyone else. I'm no spec writer as you probably can tell <smile>. Funny, the page seems updated since I saw it last. It now says: A conformance checker must report the lack of a text alternative as an error. The image element <img> is only valid when at least one of the following is true. The • alt attribute is present (empty or non-empty), or • aria-labelledby attribute present (non-empty only), or • aria-label attribute is present (non-empty only), or • <img> element is located within a <figure> element that has a non-empty <figcaption> element, or • role attribute is present and has a value of "presentation". This still does not mention the "alt-is-missing-and-I-know-it attribute in response to my question below. I am still concerned that, therefore, we voted on an incomplete proposal. Did we? > >> B) Serious issue: Whether or not we say that authoring tools must >> generate conforming documents, anyone writing a tool would normally >> wish to and expect to, and may well be instructed to by their >> management. Being silent on the subject, as the replacement text is, >> will simply encourage the behavior of putting in 'nonce' values (e.g. >> alt="" or alt="<file-name>"). > > WAI CG said that they would not object to allowing a "generated" or > "missing" attribute to address this point. [2] The document says, "In > order to address both the validity and human generation concerns, we > do not oppose the creation of 'autogenerated' and 'missing' attributes > where either one of these could be used to make an image that does not > have any human-generated text alternatives valid. (Note: It is > important that this marker is not included in the alternative text > string itself.)" > David Singer Multimedia and Software Standards, Apple Inc.
Received on Monday, 26 April 2010 16:58:30 UTC