- From: Dave Singer <singer@apple.com>
- Date: Thu, 21 Aug 2008 14:26:01 +0200
- To: Laura Carlson <laura.lee.carlson@gmail.com>, Doug Schepers <schepers@w3.org>
- Cc: Karl Dubost <karl@w3.org>, Ian Hickson <ian@hixie.ch>, HTML WG <public-html@w3.org>, W3C WAI-XTECH <wai-xtech@w3.org>, wai-liaison@w3.org, John Foliot <foliot@wats.ca>, Gez Lemon <gez.lemon@gmail.com>, Al Gilman <alfred.s.gilman@ieee.org>, w3c-wai-pf@w3.org
We just went through extensive discussion and communication with other groups to work out how to make alt mandatory, and make it clear how to abide by that mandate in a whole host of situations, with examples. I personally do not see a problem with moving the discussion and examples to the WCAG documents, if that group wishes, but I uncomfortable with going backwards, in two senses: a) reverting to the lack of clarity in the HTML4 situation, which resulted in alt="" being (ab)used, or alt being omitted, too often (IMHO); b) relaxing the formal requirement that alt be present (which is similar to (a)). As far as I can see, the G in WCAG etc. stands for guidelines, guidelines which should be read and interpreted by the writers of specs as well as the writers of web sites. It's not the WCAG job to make normative requirements in say HTML, it's ours. So, my feeling is that I haven't seen an actual problem with the current text in HTML5, beyond the reasonable recommendation that at some point the text that is more about discussion and examples should probably move somewhere out of the formal spec. (and that 'somewhere else' would ideally be in an accessibility document, probably). -- David Singer Apple/QuickTime
Received on Thursday, 21 August 2008 12:27:21 UTC