Re: New issue: IMG section of HTML5 draft contradicts WCAG 1 & WCAG 2 (draft)

On Apr 14, 2008, at 18:26, Christophe Strobbe wrote:
> If HTML 5 were to specify certain values (e.g. "_notsupplied" and  
> "_decorative") that would need to be used when real text alternative  
> cannot be provided (as John Foliot proposed at <http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/wai-xtech/2008Apr/0094.html 
> > and <http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-html/2008Apr/0289.html 
> >), these values could be a technique to meet the last item of  
> success criterion 1.1 of WCAG 2.0 (<http://www.w3.org/TR/2007/WD-WCAG20-20071211/#text-equiv-all 
> > in the current draft):
> "If it [= non-text content] is pure decoration, or used only for  
> visual formatting, or if it is not presented to users, then it is  
> implemented in a way that it can be ignored by assistive technology."
>
> This would not "require the impossible". It would allow us to keep  
> the alt attribute as a required attribute in HTML 5, and allow sites  
> with file upload functions to meet success criterion 1.1 of WCAG 2.0.


That's more crufty and inelegant than defining an absent alt attribute  
to mean "not supplied" and defining alt='' to mean "decorative". The  
only thing you proposal would accomplish is clinging onto a dogma. It  
wouldn't make an user agent any more able to present the page to the  
user.

-- 
Henri Sivonen
hsivonen@iki.fi
http://hsivonen.iki.fi/

Received on Tuesday, 15 April 2008 10:50:18 UTC