- From: John Foliot <foliot@wats.ca>
- Date: Tue, 15 Apr 2008 13:44:10 -0700
- To: "'Ian Hickson'" <ian@hixie.ch>
- Cc: "'Tomas Caspers'" <tomas@tomascaspers.de>, <wai-xtech@w3.org>, <wai-liaison@w3.org>, <public-html@w3.org>, "'HTML4All'" <list@html4all.org>
Ian Hickson wrote: > > Right, because the UA/AT is in a much better place to know how to > help the user in these cases. The idea here is to help the user. Then start by giving the user something that their AT can work with. You are handing them a vacuum and saying figure it out. Ian, there is a picture on my desk, what is it of? You are asking AT to play "Is it bigger than a breadbox" and then not answering any of the questions. The current spec goes to great lengths explaining to authors on how to do many, many things (and if I've never formally gone on record as acknowledging this strength, I will do so now - take the compliment Ian). But in this particular case, the spec is excusing a key player (the authoring tool/web-app) from it's role in ensuring that the playing field remain level. You are saying "we can't come up with a solution, so AT needs to do so" while at the same time giving AT *absolutely* nothing to work with. > We > can get better accessibility by letting user agents compete on best > handling of these images than we can by letting servers, who have > near zero motivation to address this issue, try to come up with some > half-baked solution. But if the servers *must* provide part of the solution (to be "conformant" servers) you have given them the motivation. Besides, it's not the server, it's the 'web-app' running on the server. Flickr and Photobucket use servers to deliver content, and it's the content we are focusing on here, not the machines. > > Reserved values are just syntactic variants on omitting the attribute. > There is no practical difference. (Well, other than reserved values > being significantly less usable in today's UAs, and omitting the > alt="" attribute being cleaner, which is why the spec says to omit > the attribute instead of inventing some new reserved value.) Yes and no. Reserved values can be programmatically assigned whatever values/uses a user-agent needs or wants. By using a reserved value, AT, all AT not just a particular flavor or brand of AT, can parse the value and say "oh, one of those... I do this with those" consistently. While there is a weak semantic value to a reserved value, there is *some* value, whereas the vacuum of not having any alt value is just that, a vacuum, and asks essentially for a guess, without providing *ANY* clues. Visual users can see the photo, non-visual users are discriminated against by being handed nothing. Finally, "Whatever the device you use for getting your information out, it should be the same information." - TBL ...suggests to me that it should *not* be the final consuming user-agent that must deal with the problem (end of the supply chain), but rather the author and authoring tools (beginning of the supply chain) - it's the old adage: garbage in = garbage out and nothing within the spec currently contradicts or corrects this problem. JF
Received on Tuesday, 15 April 2008 20:44:55 UTC