[Bug 13651] Missing alt should not be considered conforming in the presence of figcaptions over 50 words in length.

http://www.w3.org/Bugs/Public/show_bug.cgi?id=13651

Benjamin Hawkes-Lewis <bhawkeslewis@googlemail.com> changed:

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--- Comment #6 from Benjamin Hawkes-Lewis <bhawkeslewis@googlemail.com> 2011-08-07 11:04:22 UTC ---
(In reply to comment #3)
> (In reply to comment #2)
> > EDITOR'S RESPONSE: 
> > Status: Rejected
> > Change Description: no spec change
> > Rationale: There's nothing wrong with verbose alternative text.
> 
> Please provide proof of this statement.

Surely the onus of demonstrating that problems exist needs to be on we who
suggest changes to the draft?

> > Pictures, we
> > are told, are worth a thousand words; textual alternatives of that length are
> > not out of the question.
> 
> This is incorrect.
> 
> Sufficient Techniques for 1.1.1 - Non-text Content:

[snip]

> http://www.w3.org/WAI/WCAG20/quickref/#text-equiv 

You're citing documents that provide neither a rationale for dividing text
alternatives into short and long nor a way to determine whether "a thousand
words" is too long to be a short alternative. That citation does not support
your claim that what Ian is saying is "incorrect".

(In passing, as these documents are not part of the WCAG2 Recommendation, they
don't have conformance implications either.)

> > There is no usability problem here
> 
> Please provide proof of this statement.

Again, such proofs need to be provided by we who suggest changes to the draft?

> > since an AT can
> > just provide a way for the user to signal that it should move on to something
> > more interesting.
> 
> Please provide proof of this statement.

Consider the case where the user is consuming the content linearly. <figure>
will be mapped to the accessibility tree. Future AT can provide commands such
as "Skip Figure" to move the point of regard past the <figure> element. For
users who want to skip automatically, AT could be configured to read up to an
arbitrary word/sentence limit, provide a "Continues" cue, and then skip the
rest of the <figure>. Even today JAWS has a "Next Paragraph" command that would
either accelerate progress through the text alternative or skip the user beyond
it:

  
http://www.freedomscientific.com/doccenter/archives/training/JAWSKeystrokes.htm

Consider the case where the user is consuming the content discontinuously,
jumping between <img> element, and the AT reads the alternative text for an
<img> from <figcaption>. JAWS already provides commands for jumping between
graphics, listing graphics, skipping to the next element, skipping to the next
different element, and skipping to the next element of the same type. Again,
one could build an AT that only reads up to an arbitrary word/sentence limit by
default.

So in both scenarios the user would have a way to signal as Ian suggests. With
some AT, an approximation of that capability exists today.

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Received on Sunday, 7 August 2011 11:04:29 UTC