Re: Alternative text

At 11/10/2006 11:25 AM, Debi Orton wrote:
>What would be really nice is if there were some sort of flag the 
>developer could set (something like 'informational="no/yes"' that 
>the AT user could use to have images treated as they'd prefer.


This would be easy to implement either server-side (using PHP etc.) 
or client-side using JavaScript.  In either case, a script could 
cycle through img elements in the document either enabling or 
disabling alt attributes using any of several possible methods.

I'd be tempted to make alt suppression discretionary, with some 
images retaining their alt text unconditionally.  Some images truly 
are crucial content and to remove their alt text would be to render 
them practically invisible to the AT user, while other images could 
be safely de-alted without significantly reducing the usability of 
the page.  I'd be inclined to differentiate these two categories of 
image using the class attribute.

Regards,
Paul