- From: Maciej Stachowiak <mjs@apple.com>
- Date: Mon, 18 Jun 2007 19:06:03 -0700
- To: Charles McCathieNevile <chaals@opera.com>
- Cc: "Gregory J. Rosmaita" <oedipus@hicom.net>, Lachlan Hunt <lachlan.hunt@lachy.id.au>, public-html@w3.org
On Jun 18, 2007, at 6:44 PM, Charles McCathieNevile wrote: > On Tue, 19 Jun 2007 03:08:53 +0200, Maciej Stachowiak > <mjs@apple.com> wrote: > >> ALT should not be required either. It leads to pointless alt="" on >> images that have no reasonable text equivalent, just to satisfy >> conformance checkers. And that is actively harmful, because AT >> can't tell the difference between a semantically null image and a >> semantically meaningful image with no text alternative. > > So if it were not required, you would have alt="" on things that > need no text, alt="useful information" on things that are useful > information, and nothing on poorly authored content which may or > may not need an alt attribute? Such content is not necessarily poorly authored. To once again cite my favorite example, consider <http://flickr.com/photos/othermaciej>. The photo images on it are semantically meaningful (they are the whole point of the page), but alt text would not really improve accessibility of this page. Repeating the titles and captions on the photos would be pointless and would also not provide something that's actually an alternative for the image. > The approach we took in ATAG 1 was to require noting that the > absence of alt is an error, but also require that no default be > generated, which is in line with this thinking... Sadly, sometimes tools and web app authors feel compelled to make their output pass validators. So flickr for example puts alt="" on my photos for me. Regards, Maciej
Received on Tuesday, 19 June 2007 02:06:14 UTC