RE: alt and authoring practices

MB> It seems like gathering data from various sources would advance this
MB> debate more usefully than any amount of speculation on what might be.

IH> What data would you like me to collect?

Well, the data from a web crawl that seem germane would be
along the lines of percentages of images for the oft-mentioned
three cases:

. have no alt attribute
. have an alt=""
. have an alt="(a descriptive string)"

Obviously that still gives you no sense how often the alt
text is useful, but it's a start.  One could imagine trying to run
algorithms against the alt text to get a sense of the frequency of
useful alt text, but that sounds more like research than data
collection. Not sure the alt-trust-level value can be determined
algorithmically. ;-)

Other data that would seem helpful:

. Current behavior of "alt-using" browsers (e.g. Lynx, assistive
  technologies) when finding those same three cases

. Results from usability studies of "alt-using" browser
  users--did current software work? where did it fail?

These are just my thoughts from the messages I have read. I
imagine those working heavily on such topics will have more ideas.

regards,
Matt
--
Matt Bonner
Hewlett-Packard Company

-----Original Message-----
From: Ian Hickson [mailto:ian@hixie.ch] 
Sent: Wednesday, April 16, 2008 2:40 PM
To: Bonner, Matt (IPG)
Cc: Anne van Kesteren; Steven Faulkner; James Graham; public-html@w3.org;
wai-xtech@w3.org; wai-liaison@w3.org
Subject: RE: alt and authoring practices

On Wed, 16 Apr 2008, Bonner, Matt (IPG) wrote:
>
> It seems like gathering data from various sources would advance this
> debate more usefully than any amount of speculation on what might be.

What data would you like me to collect?

--
Ian Hickson               U+1047E                )\._.,--....,'``.    fL
http://ln.hixie.ch/       U+263A                /,   _.. \   _\  ;`._ ,.
Things that are impossible just take longer.   `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'