Re: null alt revisited

Re: "I'd almost rather see [IMAGE] displayed than see " ""
It is easy to visually ignore [IMAGE]. It is impossible to ignore it when
you are listening to the page.

Jim Thatcher
IBM Special Needs Systems
www.ibm.com/sns
thatch@us.ibm.com
(512)838-0432



Kynn Bartlett <kynn-hwg@idyllmtn.com> on 04/08/99 11:13:27 AM

To:   love26@gorge.net
cc:   "w3c-wai-au@w3.org" <w3c-wai-au@w3.org> (bcc: James
      Thatcher/Austin/IBM)
Subject:  Re: null alt revisited





At 08:57 a.m. 04/08/99 -0700, William Loughborough wrote:
>A friend writes "I think alt=" " would be effective in forcing the
>webauthor to do SOMETHING but I also think we should be hounding browser
>vendors to break any page on which NOTHING was done with it".

As a user of lynx and an Opera user who has 'image loading off'
by default, I'd almost rather see [IMAGE] displayed than see " "
(whitespace), in the case of a broken web page.  (Broken meaning
something that doesn't have correct ALT text.  Naturally, I far
prefer correct ALT text to anything else.)

Why?  Because then at least I know there's something there!  In
the above scenario, the designer would be just as negligent BUT
I'd have no clue that they'd done that, since it might not even
show me any indication of an image at all.

I'm not saying that lack of ALT is acceptable, I'm just showing
why a _default_ of ALT=" " is just as bad.

--
Kynn Bartlett <kynn@hwg.org>
President, Governing Board Member
HTML Writers Guild <URL:http://www.hwg.org>

Received on Thursday, 8 April 1999 13:07:09 UTC