- From: Boris Zbarsky <bzbarsky@MIT.EDU>
- Date: Fri, 11 Apr 2008 14:18:03 -0500
- To: Laurens Holst <lholst@students.cs.uu.nl>
- CC: HTML WG <public-html@w3.org>
Laurens Holst wrote: > I do not think the distinction between ‘irrelevant image’ and ‘no > alternate text available’ that you provide is very valuable to the > end-user It's not valuable as of yesterday, yes. The difference tomorrow is a relevant image with no alternate text available can be run through an image-analysis library that will try to figure out what's shown and dynamically generate alt text. Of course at that point it would well behoove people posting images to use just such a library. But the thing is, software is updated a lot more often than content. Once you post an image with an alt attribute, that's how it stays, forever. So if the alt text is being auto-generated via image analysis, it makes sense to do it with the most advanced image analysis software. All else being equal, this probably means doing it as late as possible in calendar time. If you require all images to have alt="", the UA ends up having to guess whether alt="" really means "not important" or whether it should go ahead and synthesize a description. This might be solvable, but it's a harder problem than just analyzing an image: it involves analyzing how the image interacts with the content surrounding it. -Boris
Received on Friday, 11 April 2008 19:18:53 UTC