[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

--- Comment #9 from Benjamin Hawkes-Lewis <bhawkeslewis@googlemail.com> 2011-08-07 15:10:35 UTC ---
(In reply to comment #8)
>  >Surely the onus of demonstrating that problems exist needs to be on we who
> >suggest changes to the draft?
> 
> This assumes that the draft is correct,

I think we must assume editors' drafts are "correct" (i.e. does not cause
problems) until problems are substantiated. Anything else would be chaos.

> it saves time to ask for and have provided evidence or reasoning 

On the contrary, I think it's a waste of time to ask editors to prove
unsubstantiated problems do not exist. We shouldn't be trying to obtain and
then disprove a negative proof, we should be trying to provide positive proof
for problems up front.

> otherwise the bug may be escalated because the
> editor expects the bug reporter to accept the editors word as authoritative
> without evidence. 

Failure to provide evidence of a problem in the first place almost guarantees
such escalation, just as software bug reports that do not provide steps to
reproduce a problem are unlikely to be fixed:

https://developer.mozilla.org/en/Bug_writing_guidelines

> If this does occur  then the information will be required to
> defend what's in the spec.

Effective change proposals, like effective bug reports, give evidence for
problems.

Where is the positive evidence that a 50-word text alternative is required but
a 51-word text alternatives is intrinsically not "much more verbose than what
is useful or appropriate" or "too distracting"?

What is the rationale for overloading text summaries that could be performed by
AT onto authors:

http://www.freedomscientific.com/Training/Surfs-up/Skim_Reading.htm

What is the rationale that such summarisation must be performed by adding text
to "alt" rather than by using "aria-labelled" and "aria-describedby" to point
at parts of the <figcaption>?

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Received on Sunday, 7 August 2011 15:10:37 UTC