Re: Call for review of WCAG 2.0 draft

Anne,

> You can see the pictures on http://www.enabling.org/zman/Southside.
> They are the still life pictures of the flowers with a fruit bowl.

Yes, this is a tricky one. In fact, pictures 2 and 6 don't look all that
different on my monitor (as you know, I have to set it very dark - low
contrast and brightness). The question you are putting forwards is "What
picture do you like best?". Therfore, for a non-sighted user, I suppose the
question would be "What description do you like best?". As a picture is
worth a thousand words... I'm not sure this can be done. I suppose you
could attach one word definitions such as:-

     1) Dark 2) Subtle 3) Abstract 4) Colorized 5) Grainy 6) Light

And then describe them in more detail later (through a longdesc, or large
alt).

I often find myself at a loss to get the "perfect" alt tag for my images,
because really there is no such thing. Everyone likes different
alternatives, so I suppose really it is up to what the author would like
there. The author chooses the picture, the author chooses the alt. You have
to ask yourself "if I couldn't see the images, what would I like there?".
For example, on one of my sites, it uses a pretty introduction image. The
images itself doesn't carry much semantic information, other than "welcome
to this site!", so that's what I used as the alt tag. Someone using Lynx or
whatever wouldn't even know the picture was there. It's not a perfect
sysnonym for the *meaning* of the image, but it is a synonym for the
*purpose*. I think that's what an alt is all about.

--
Kindest Regards,
Sean B. Palmer
@prefix : <http://webns.net/roughterms/> .
[ :name "Sean B. Palmer" ] :hasHomepage <http://infomesh.net/sbp/> .

Received on Friday, 16 February 2001 09:38:17 UTC