- From: Jonas Sicking <jonas@sicking.cc>
- Date: Thu, 22 Jul 2010 18:55:01 -0700
- To: Aryeh Gregor <Simetrical+w3c@gmail.com>
- Cc: Ian Hickson <ian@hixie.ch>, "public-html@w3.org" <public-html@w3.org>
On Monday, July 19, 2010, Aryeh Gregor <Simetrical+w3c@gmail.com> wrote: > On Mon, Jul 19, 2010 at 5:15 AM, Jonas Sicking <jonas@sicking.cc> wrote: >> I have two additional goals with these removals. First of all I think >> @alt is the most (or even only) successful bolt-on accessibility >> attribute in the history of HTML. And like old proverb goes: if it >> ain't broken, don't fix it. I.e. given the success of @alt, I think we >> should be extremely careful about messing around with it. For this >> reason I'd like to make the number of changes to @alt as small as >> possible. > > In what sense is alt so successful? It's true that a lot of websites > specify alt text, but in my experience, it's rarely any good. In > fact, most alt text I see is probably no better than just the > filename, which could be added automatically by the screen reader. It > seems to me that authors who use alt text overwhelmingly do so just to > shut up validators, and I can't see how this helps anyone. It's a > clear case of hidden metadata. Yes, but compare that to the quality of other bolt-on accessibility attributes like @summary or @longdesc. Compared to those @alt is a smashing success. Can you think of a bolt-on accessibility attribute that has been more successful? / Jonas
Received on Friday, 23 July 2010 01:55:34 UTC