Re: Updated ISSUE-206 CP

On Wed, Aug 22, 2012 at 12:26 AM, John Foliot <john@foliot.ca> wrote:
> UX: the unanimous feedback I heard was that yes, if an important image is on
> a page, and even if there is no textual equivalent provided, that they
> (non-sighted users) want to know of the existence of the image.

Yeah, fine, but …

The proposed attribute would be a fairly weak signal of the importance
or non-importance of the image. Its presence means little. If a
publisher republishes syndicated content, their automated systems are
unable to distinguish photos added to articles for illustration rather
than for more fluffy reasons, e.g. a random photo of a celebrity added
to an article about that celebrity that has nothing to do with the
photo, just for the sake of having a photo. Conversely, its absence
means little: the web corpus will continue to overflow with critically
important images without @alt or this new attribute.

We should be practical and concentrate on improving the accessibility
mappings to support more effective heuristics, such as intrinsic
dimensions, color variation, filename, and repeated use, that would
apply to images with or without this attribute. Arguing about,
speccing, implementing, and testing AAPI for this attribute but not
those more effective signals is a misdirection of effort.

--
Benjamin Hawkes-Lewis

Received on Wednesday, 22 August 2012 00:10:42 UTC