Re: [html4all] New issue: IMG section of HTML5 draft contradicts WCAG 1 & WCAG 2 (draft)

At 22:52  +0100 11/04/08, James Graham wrote:
>Katie Haritos-Shea wrote:
>>
>>>There are people who upload literally thousands of photos a week. 
>>>If a photo takes one minute to describe, which is probably 
>>>optimisic, that's two full days' worth of work per week just to 
>>>describe the photos. That's not happening. Even people who upload 
>>>10 photos a month don't care enough to describe their photos.
>>>
>>>You might be able to get some people to describe some of the most 
>>>popular photos, but there's no way that's going to scale to all 
>>>photos on all photo galleries, so the problem of what to do with 
>>>photos that have no useful alternative text will always exist.
>>>
>>>--
>>>Ian Hickson
>>
>>
>>Which is a good reason why alt text needs to be required by this spec
>>(HTML5).
>>
>>People will continue to commit crimes and break the law........but it
>>that a reason not to have them?
>
>It might well be a good reason not to have a particular law if it is 
>symptomatic of that law being a sub-optimal way of addressing the 
>underlying problem that it tries to solve. See also [1] for some 
>more on this and apropos examples.

Whoever commented that this is a psychological and policy issue 
rather than technical are right!

When a significant proportion of a democratic society doesn't obey a 
set of laws, then yes, I do actually think it's time to examine those 
laws and the effect they were trying to achieve, because they may not 
be succeeding.

I think we are in violent agreement about goals and struggling with 
ways.  This all hinges around the subtlety of accessibility design. 
Good accessibility results from
a) good specifications that enables it
b) good authoring that provides it
c) good user-side engineering that exposes it

So, it's not hard to see ways of building systems that fail on one of 
these three.  For example (this is a pure strawman) "if everyone 
would write a transcript of every video they posted, and link it, 
then user-agents could speak the transcript to those unable to see 
the video".  It's not hard to see that such a specification is poor 
because it's vague about how long or detailed the transcript is and 
what language it's in, or how it's synchronized with the other audio 
(or interleaved with it), it's unlikely to be done by authors, and 
(partly because of the spec. problems) rather hard to present to 
users.  Fail on all 3 counts.

-- 
David Singer
Apple/QuickTime

Received on Friday, 11 April 2008 22:08:39 UTC