- From: Ben 'Cerbera' Millard <cerbera@projectcerbera.com>
- Date: Fri, 11 Apr 2008 12:33:59 +0100
- To: "Philip TAYLOR" <Philip-and-LeKhanh@Royal-Tunbridge-Wells.Org>, "Henri Sivonen" <hsivonen@iki.fi>
- Cc: "HTMLWG" <public-html@w3.org>
Philip TAYLOR wrote:
> Henri Sivonen wrote:
>> Saying that the program should emit alt='' would lose information about
>> lack of data vs. marking the image as decorative.)
>
> Why could the program not emit something along the lines of
>
> 'alt="<no ALT text available>"'
If that's a useful thing for users to get for images with absent alt text,
the UA or AT could handle it. Specifically, markup like this:
<img src>
Would, in effect, be adjusted by the UA or AT to this:
<img src alt="No text.">
A text-to-speech device could putting an announcement such as "Image" before
or after, depending on user verbosity levels. So, for the alt-less markup,
the user would hear this:
"Image: No text."
Or this:
"No text (Image)."
In this way, omitting the alt for images where not alt is available at least
gives UAs and ATs a *chance* to do something useful. If these images used
alt="", UAs and ATs would ignore it and the user would be unaware they were
missing something.
It's only in the worst case scenario that absent alt is better than alt=""
or alt with a bogus value. Sensible alt text is preferable to all of this
wherever it is possible, of course. This is what the current spec draft
says, AFAICT:
<http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/multipage/section-embedded0.html#the-img>
--
Ben 'Cerbera' Millard
Collections of Interesting Data Tables
<http://sitesurgeon.co.uk/tables/>
Received on Friday, 11 April 2008 11:36:33 UTC