RE: alt and authoring practices

Trimming cc list.

On Wed, 16 Apr 2008, Bonner, Matt (IPG) wrote:
>> 
>> What data would you like me to collect?
> 
> Well, the data from a web crawl that seem germane would be along the 
> lines of percentages of images for the oft-mentioned three cases:
> 
> . have no alt attribute
> . have an alt=""
> . have an alt="(a descriptive string)"
> 
> Obviously that still gives you no sense how often the alt text is 
> useful, but it's a start.

A start towards what?

As I said to Karl, before I spend money on this, I'd really like to know 
what hypothesis we are testing.


> One could imagine trying to run algorithms against the alt text to get a 
> sense of the frequency of useful alt text, but that sounds more like 
> research than data collection. Not sure the alt-trust-level value can be 
> determined algorithmically. ;-) [...]

Indeed, anything that requires human intervention isn't something I can 
do without significant help.

-- 
Ian Hickson               U+1047E                )\._.,--....,'``.    fL
http://ln.hixie.ch/       U+263A                /,   _.. \   _\  ;`._ ,.
Things that are impossible just take longer.   `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'

Received on Wednesday, 16 April 2008 22:50:10 UTC