- From: James Graham <jg307@cam.ac.uk>
- Date: Thu, 16 Aug 2007 10:04:38 +0100
- To: "Gregory J. Rosmaita" <oedipus@hicom.net>
- Cc: Maciej Stachowiak <mjs@apple.com>, Jason White <jason@jasonjgw.net>, public-html@w3.org, wai-xtech@w3.org
Gregory J. Rosmaita wrote: > 3. how does leaving alt out entirely when an image is not "purely > decorative" "better" serve someone merely by indicating the > presence of an image? The question you have to ask is better than what alternative? Obviously a missing alt attribute is not better than the alternative of well written alt text, and nobody has argued it is (as an aside, the draft goes in to a great deal of detail on how to write good alt text, far more detail than HTML 4 and far more than it goes into for any other attribute, presumably reflecting the great importance that the editor places on well written alt text as an accessibility aid). However a casual glance at the web will indicate that many sites do not have well written alt text. Even where the alt text is present it is often unhelpful either duplicating content that is in the main text (e.g. flickr), containing text that is not an alternative to the image (your photo gallery) or containing blank values for non-decorative images. Is the user really better off with the unhelpful alt text than with the information that an image is missing and whatever attempt the browser can make at extracting metadata from the file itself (e.g. by reading the EXIF headers in a JPEG file)? My feeling is they are not. Also, maintaining the distinction between alt="" meaning "This is a decorative image" and menaing "I wanted to validate but didn't think of alternative text" should prevent non-graphical browsers from having to treat all instances of alt="" as signifying potentially-important-but-inaccessible images. -- "Mixed up signals Bullet train People snuffed out in the brutal rain" --Conner Oberst
Received on Thursday, 16 August 2007 09:05:20 UTC