Re: Discussion: Text Alternative Survey

On Apr 22, 2010, at 23:18 , Laura Carlson wrote:
> Dave commented on the survey:
> 
>> A) The replacement text falls far short of the editorial quality of the text it replaces.
> 
> Any suggestions for improvement? I'd really appreciate help from you
> or anyone else. I'm no spec writer as you probably can tell <smile>.

As long as we're clear that this is not verbatim text, but intent, the editor is really good at this!

> 
>> B) Serious issue: Whether or not we say that authoring tools must
>> generate conforming documents, anyone writing a tool would normally
>> wish to and expect to, and may well be instructed to by their
>> management. Being silent on the subject, as the replacement text is,
>> will simply encourage the behavior of putting in 'nonce' values (e.g.
>> alt="" or alt="<file-name>").
> 
> WAI CG said that they would not object to allowing a "generated" or
> "missing" attribute to address this point. [2]  The document says, "In
> order to address both the validity and human generation concerns, we
> do not oppose the creation of 'autogenerated' and 'missing' attributes
> where either one of these could be used to make an image that does not
> have any human-generated text alternatives valid. (Note: It is
> important that this marker is not included in the alternative text
> string itself.)"


OK, mere surprise is not enough.  I am forced to resort to astonishment.

They *like* 'lies' and/or useless values?  I clearly need to learn something here.  And this paragraph seems to be self-contradictory:  we don't object to 'generated' text as long as it doesn't appear in the place where the text has to appear?  Or is this saying they'd like *another* attribute 'missing-alt="true and the authoring tool knows it and yes I have asked him twice this morning to deal with it!"'?


David Singer
Multimedia and Software Standards, Apple Inc.

Received on Friday, 23 April 2010 23:21:33 UTC