Re: RESOLUTION to modify text alternative change proposal and reject WAI CG's consensus recommendation

Hi, Gez:

One correction to what you write ...

Our compromise is contingent. The WCAG pointers are required or there's
no deal. That's why we say "normative."

Janina


Gez Lemon writes:
> On 9 April 2010 22:51, John Foliot <jfoliot@stanford.edu> wrote:
> > Laura Carlson wrote:
> >>
> >> >
> >> > I don't see anything in the resolution that takes this away,
> >>
> >> Oh but it does.
> >>
> >> * An error is something that is invalid.
> >> * A warning is something that is valid.
> >
> > Hi Laura,
> >
> > I am concerned about getting bogged down in the semantics of a word. Where
> > are you taking these definitions from? Henri's validators.nu (which,
> > AFAIK, is really the only HTML5 validator we have available to us)?
> 
> Isn't this the crux of the issue? The face-to-face group were more
> concerned with a glimmer of hope (nothing guaranteed) that Henri's
> validator (an experimental application, not formally associated with
> the W3C) would be more likely to flag missing alt as a warning than an
> error. It appears to be an issue of compromise, albeit one-sided with
> no guarantees. By anyone's definition, images without a text
> alternative (even if that alternative is to indicate the image is
> presentational) are structurally incomplete - an error. The
> specification should state that images MUST have a text alternative
> (by any of the means proposed by the ALT task force set up to deal
> with this issue), but the face-to-face accessibility task force
> (emphasis on face-to-face, and that this hasn't yet been accepted by
> the task force as a whole) are willing to compromise the specification
> for someone's validator.
> 
> > Frankly, we can call it 'green jello'
> 
> Being a foreigner, I have no idea what green jello is, but it sounds
> an appropriate name for defining something that is structurally
> incomplete as a warning, rather than an error.
> 
> > if the behavior we got was that when
> > an <img> lacked an @alt value the author was taken to the WAI-authored
> > page on how to fix this 'broken-ness'. To me, *THAT* is what we want to
> > have, rather than get stuck over a word.
> 
> Personally, I would rather the specification be correct, rather than
> trying to satisfy someone's validator. There aren't even any
> guarantees it will be flagged as a warning by this validator; just a
> suggestion that it's more likely to be accepted as a warning in this
> validator if the accessibility task force are willing to compromise.
> By lowering expectations at this early stage, the accessibility task
> force are going to find it even more difficult to insist that images
> without a text alternative are structurally incomplete when it's
> refused, as they are asserting that it's not that important (just a
> warning).
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> -- 
> _____________________________
> Supplement your vitamins
> http://juicystudio.com
> http://twitter.com/gezlemon

-- 

Janina Sajka,	Phone:	+1.443.300.2200
		sip:janina@asterisk.rednote.net

Chair, Open Accessibility	janina@a11y.org	
Linux Foundation		http://a11y.org

Chair, Protocols & Formats
Web Accessibility Initiative	http://www.w3.org/wai/pf
World Wide Web Consortium (W3C)

Received on Saturday, 10 April 2010 17:40:45 UTC