- From: Charles McCathieNevile <chaals@opera.com>
- Date: Sun, 15 Jul 2007 18:19:23 +0900
- To: "Robert Burns" <rob@robburns.com>, "Patrick Garies" <pgaries@fastmail.us>
- Cc: public-html@w3.org
On Sun, 15 Jul 2007 17:06:41 +0900, Robert Burns <rob@robburns.com> wrote: > To take out one of your examples: >> Code: <img alt="?" src="cat.png"> >> Code <p>I let my cat, Fluffy, played with a ball of yarn when we were >> at my friend’s house a year ago. He seemed to enjoy it.</p> > > My contention (and this was a point I think Jon was making too), is that > when a textual equivalent describing the image is already in the > surrounding prose, it shouldn't be repeated for the @alt attribute. My > proposal was something shorter that let's the user know what meaning the > image conveys in a way that matches it with the prose available to all > users. > > I suppose an alternative could be: >> Code: <img alt="Fluffy with the ball of yarn" longdesc='#fluffyplays' >> src="cat.png"> >> Code <p id='fluffyplays' >I let my cat, Fluffy, played with a ball of >> yarn when we were at my friend’s house a year ago. He seemed to enjoy >> it.</p> ... In both the above cases, a lot of accessibility people would advise (correctly, IMHO) that you should have alt="" signifying that there isn't anything you *need* to replace the image. The longdesc in the second example (and a putative one in the first example that points to some other content describing fluffy and the yarn) provides the clue that a user needs to know there was an image so they can know there is more description should they desire it. (Configuration might be different for internal and external references, so that in the second example longdesc by default is suppressed, unless the user asks for a more informative view of the page). >> Image: icon depicting a house >> Bad Example: <a href="/"><img alt="House Icon" src="home.png"></a> >> Good Example: <a href="/"><img alt="Go to the Home Page" >> src="home.png"></a> Indeed. Idiomatically in english, this might just be alt="home", in french it is more likely to be "accueil" (reception), and in spanish "pagina principal". The key to alt is not what the image looks like, but what you would put there if there were no image. And the normal design ideas about avoiding redundancy, maintaining consistency, and so on apply to text as well, although some of the specifics are slightly different. Think about flow and identifying terms as equivalent to having images that have clear borders against those that vaguely merge into the background for some qualitative idea of what I mean. (Longdesc is about the appearance of the image. How do you recognise what someone describes as "the thing that is vaguely shaped like a squashed african war mask - some designer apparently figured that would conjure up the idea of home", or how do you realise that this is a caricature of the Mona Lisa, with a beer, cigarette, and her hair in curlers, rather than the real real thing - and would you recognise it again next time?. One of the nice things about having longdesc as an external reference is that you can re-use and cache it across different usage of the same image). cheers Chaals -- Charles McCathieNevile, Opera Software: Standards Group hablo español - je parle français - jeg lærer norsk chaals@opera.com Catch up: Speed Dial http://opera.com
Received on Sunday, 15 July 2007 09:19:43 UTC