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

On Jun 24, 2007, at 12:40 PM, Gregory J. Rosmaita wrote:

> Maciej Stachowiak wrote, quote:
> 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
> unquote
>
> then why do you not have long descriptions of your photos?

Because it's not the norm for photographers to also write an essay on  
the topic of their photo. If everyone had to do that for each  
photograph they posted, then they would not post any. A photograph  
takes seconds, writing a detailed description of it takes hours. I  
have friends with 10s of thousands of photos posted online, and it  
would take a lifetime to write useful long descriptions for all of them.

> it IS an authoring problem -- you can only describe the photo with a
> long description -- a caption does not a long description make; a
> long description makes sense out of the purely visual elements on
> the page -- not just "Maciej Crossing the North Sea", but a  
> description
> of your physical characteristics, the type of boat you are  
> travelling in,
> the color and tenor of the sky and sea, etc.

Sorry, I don't think it is reasonable to hold hobbyist photographers  
to such a standard. It's certainly not something you find in real- 
life photo galleries.

Regards,
Maciej

Received on Monday, 25 June 2007 08:10:02 UTC