- From: Jonas Sicking <jonas@sicking.cc>
- Date: Fri, 7 May 2010 02:03:13 -0700
- To: Steven Faulkner <faulkner.steve@gmail.com>
- Cc: Anne van Kesteren <annevk@opera.com>, HTML WG <public-html@w3.org>
On Fri, May 7, 2010 at 1:53 AM, Steven Faulkner <faulkner.steve@gmail.com> wrote: > Hi Anne,>but it seems that in Example 2.3 it is not explained what > >> the advantage of including an alternative text in the first place is. If >> there is a full description it seems one could just use alt="". > > The description is an alternative interpretation of the flowchart. if > alt="" was used the image would be removed from the accessibility tree > for AT users, which is incorrect, the image is not meaningless, it > contains information which a range of users could interpret with the > aid of the short text alternative and longer description. > > The alt in this case provides an accessible name for the image that > identifies the image for users AT users. It also provides a text > alternative for users who have images turned off in their browsers, so > they can if they wish load and view the image. If alt="" was used > there would be no indication that an image was there. > > please file a bug if you aren't satisfied with my reasoning. It would be very interesting to see research on how people use alt today. I would think there is a not insignificant amount of content out there where the 'alt' attribute contains a description rather than true alternative text. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if this was the case in the majority of cases when alt is used. My concern is that with this definition of alt, we'd instantly not only make a large body of content inaccessible. We'd also do AT users a disservice by telling AT software to hide the fact that there is an image there since the alt attribute was used. / Jonas
Received on Friday, 7 May 2010 09:04:06 UTC