On May 15, 2008, at 01:35, Gez Lemon wrote: > The responsibility for accessibility doesn't fall purely on an > authoring tool, although they surely have some responsibility. > Accessibility is the responsibility of the content author, the > authoring tool they use, and the user agent that the end-user chooses > to use. If any of these stakeholders fail in their responsibilities, > then the end result is likely to be inaccessible to some users. > > If an authoring tool isn't provided anything that can be used as > alternative text, then the authoring tool certainly should not try and > guess what the alternative should be, as only the content author could > know with any certainty what a suitable replacement for an image could > be. The most sensible thing to do in this scenario would be to not > include an alt attribute at all, as it hasn't been provided by the > author. I agree with you up to here. > From what I understand, at this point, my opinion is completely > aligned with members from the HTML5 community. The difference in our > opinions is that although I would suggest the authoring tool has done > the right thing for this particular scenario, the HTML5 working group > want the resulting output to be considered to be in compliance with > the specification. I disagree with this viewpoint, as the resulting > structure is inconceivable to some users with visual impairments and > cognitive disabilities, in a way that the resulting structure would be > inconceivable to sighted users if the src attribute wasn't provided in > a browser that renders images. That is the structure is inaccessible, > and couldn't possibly be considered valid. The notion that a syntax specification should require software conforming to the specification to produce syntactically non- conforming output under some circumstances is patently bizarre. We shouldn't require something that is bizarre in a way that it doesn't fit the software developer mindset, because then we don't get the reactions we want from software developers. -- Henri Sivonen hsivonen@iki.fi http://hsivonen.iki.fi/Received on Thursday, 15 May 2008 07:44:10 UTC
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