Re: alt crazyness (Re: alt and authoring practices)

Olivier GENDRIN writes:

> On Sat, May 3, 2008 at 3:44 PM, Smylers <Smylers@stripey.com> wrote:
> 
> > Olivier GENDRIN writes:
> 
> > > And the content would be tainted by the result of the image
> > > analysis.  A single image can have thousands of meanings, which
> > > one will choose the image analysis? Will it have also to analyse
> > > the context to guess a probable meaning ?
> >
> > Sure, that's unfortunate.  But we're in a situation where that data
> > simply doesn't exist; it's far from ideal, but it happens.  The HTML
> > 5 spec can't magic that data out of nowhere, so heuristics are the
> > best that can be done.
> >
> > The only questions are where's the best place to perform those
> > heuristics, and should pages which require such heuristics be deemed
> > valid webpages/
> 
> Let's imagine a situation : i'm blind and i'm reading a contract to
> buy something. In that online contract, there is an image conveying an
> important information that misses @alt.

That document isn't valid according to either the HTML 5 or HTML 4 specs
(because it's missing the alt attribute).  As such it appears to have
been created by somebody who doesn't care about following standards (nor
accessibility).

It's unclear what HTML 5 could do about this situation: quite simply
whatever it says could be ignored by such an author.

> The heuristic of my UA leads to understand something completly wrong,

Following HTML 5, the browser should flag the image as being important
but without any alternative representation.  That would be correct in
this case.  As technology allows, the browser could also heuristically
try to provide more information about the image.

So long as the browser indicates that it is guessing, then you're in a
position to know that you're missing some information about the
contract.

There isn't anything your browser can do to magic up the missing
information; the best it can do is make you aware that you're missing
it.  Hopefully you'd then be in a position to demand it.

> that leads my company to loose an important amount of money.
> 
> Who will I suit ?

Sue Hixie -- I'm pretty sure that absolutely everything even slightly
related to HTML 5 is automatically deemed to be his fault ...

Smylers

Received on Saturday, 3 May 2008 17:52:05 UTC