Re: conflation of issues or convergence of interests?

2007/7/31, Sander Tekelenburg <st@isoc.nl>:
>
> At 21:17 -0700 UTC, on 2007-07-30, L. David Baron wrote:
>
> > On Tuesday 2007-07-31 05:25 +0200, Sander Tekelenburg wrote:
>
> [... title="" to suppress @alt tooltips in a some specific UA]
>
> >> How is that not an authoring error? It's not the author's job fix UA bugs.
> >
> > Web authors spend a significant portion of their time working around
> > UA bugs.  They want their page to be accessible to the portion of
> > their users with buggy browsers
>
> I can't follow. Which definition of accessible are you using here?
>
> >, just as they want their page to be
> > accessible to the portion who are blind, etc.
>
> But in this particular example we're talking about an authoring trick that
> makes the page less accessible to blind (and other) users, aren't we?
>

Sorry, but I can't follow how setting an empty title attribute might
make a page less accessible to blind users if the image has a proper
alt attribute set.

Web authors doesn't have to fix UA bugs, no. They only have to do
whatever the client tells them to do, and if the client doesn't want a
useless tooltip to appear when hovering an image in IE, then they have
4 options as far as I can see:
1. Don't set an alt for that image
2. Set an empty title.
3. Tell the client to stop using IE
4. Tell the client that this is the way that it works and that if he
is not happy I'm sorry for him

We all can agree that (1) isn't desirable, so it shouldn't be
considered as an option at all.

With regards to (2), you say that setting an empty title makes the
page less accessible, but I fail to understand it. The user agent
should be able to provide the alternative text for an image, it
doesn't matter any other attribute set on that image. It would be like
suddenly saying that setting alt for an image makes the longdesc
non-accessible.

For (3) , the client most of the times won't even know that he can use
anything that it isn't already in his desktop, and although we can try
to show him alternatives, as soon as we move away he'll click again in
the very same icon as he has been doing all the time. Or whatever, he
just won't change the browser.

Last, option (4). Sometimes he will understand it and everything is
fine. But others won't. Or his boss won't understand it, and if we
don't provide a solution he'll search another one for his next web
(even for the current web if we are just prototyping it), one that
doesn't put alt for the images or has created the web in flash or any
other thing that it's really less accessible, but matches what he
wants. And because he has already gone away you can't tell him that
the alternative web that he has got is poorer and less accessible.

Received on Tuesday, 31 July 2007 11:16:44 UTC