- From: James Graham <jg307@cam.ac.uk>
- Date: Mon, 12 May 2008 16:40:25 +0100
- To: Steven Faulkner <faulkner.steve@gmail.com>
- CC: Maciej Stachowiak <mjs@apple.com>, "public-html@w3.org" <public-html@w3.org>, W3C WAI-XTECH <wai-xtech@w3.org>, wai-liaison@w3.org, Dan Connolly <connolly@w3.org>, Chris Wilson <Chris.Wilson@microsoft.com>, "Michael(tm) Smith" <mike@w3.org>
Steven Faulkner wrote: >> Is there any reason to believe that redundant text description of an image >> that recapitulates the text is helpful, rather than harmful, to users who >> use textual alternatives? > > > potential benficiaries of this information include, blind users, > visually impaired users, cognitively impaired users and user with > intellectual disabilities. each of the user groups have different > needs and AT that they use will consume and present the information in > a variety of ways, users are also provided with a wide variety of > options on how to navigate and access content. So your simplistic > notion of redundancy does not hold up. > > examples: > A screen reader user may initially hear the short summary of the image > content, then access then access the longer description via a key > stroke. > > The screen magnifier/reader user who can see the image, but not > understand its contents due to it being to blurred, will have the alt > text announced, to give them some idea of the image content. > > The cognitively impaired user accessing the page using a talking > browser, likewise will have the benefit of a short image label, > although they may not be able to understand the content of the image > from its visual rendering. > > for all of these users the presence of the short alt text provides an > alternative labelling mechanism that can be presented to the user via > their AT. It sounds like these use cases sound are those that the title attribute is intended to address — they are short descriptions of the image rather than replacement content for it. Do typical ATs not support the title attribute for these cases? Maybe it would be more effective to get those products fixed rather than trying to overload alt to address this set of problems as well. -- "Eternity's a terrible thought. I mean, where's it all going to end?" -- Tom Stoppard, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead
Received on Monday, 12 May 2008 15:41:08 UTC