Re: [A11y] requiring alt Re: fear of "invisible metadata"

On Jun 19, 2007, at 12:54 AM, aurélien levy wrote:

> Yes and it's good a good things, if they don't do that AT will give  
> the url or name of the file, this way the photo can be skipped by AT.

Is skipping the photo really better than mentioning the filename in  
this case? It's not purely decorative, it matters that it is there. A  
text-only but visual UA like Lynx should should the filename with a  
download link for instance. In any case, since you described a  
behavior difference between omitting alt and specifying alt="", I  
presume that there's cases where either behavior is useful.

Furthermore, as Chaals mentioned, adding a default empty alt text is  
contrary to WCAG.

> I really don't understand the willing to remove some basic features  
> for AT and web accessibility and on the other way the willing to  
> add numbers of new "semantic" markup that in my opinion will result  
> a less accessible web by increasing the difficulty to write "good"  
> html, the difficulty to check if the markup is good and the  
> capacity to misused this new markup.
> Dan or Karl can you please ask to a WCAG working group member to be  
> involved to this group because i really thing that we are going to  
> a wrong way on web accessibility and i hope that an "official" guy  
> will be more understand and listen that the others accessibility  
> guys in this group

My comments are not speaking for the group, only for myself. Also,  
I'm not suggesting to remove anything. I think the alt attribute  
should be retained. But I think that it should no longer be required,  
since requiring it always leads to worse accessibility and media- 
independence in some cases, in my opinion.

Regards,
Maciej

>
> Aurélien
>>
>> 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 08:07:11 UTC