- From: Matthew Thomas <mpt@myrealbox.com>
- Date: Thu, 6 Jan 2005 21:14:42 +1300
On 6 Jan, 2005, at 3:19 AM, Matthew Raymond wrote: > > I would like to see the |alt| attribute for elements <img> and > <area> changed from a required attribute to an implied one. (That would be a change of direction: alt= was implied up to HTML 3.2, and made compulsory in HTML 4.0. <http://www.w3.org/MarkUp/html-spec/html-spec_5.html#SEC5.10> <http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html32#img> <http://www.w3.org/TR/1998/REC-html40-19980424/struct/objects.html#h -13.2>) > In other words, markup that looks like this... > > <img src="image.png" alt=""> > > ....should look like this... > > <img src="image.png"> > ... For perhaps 95 percent of the images on the Web, the most appropriate alternate text is nothing at all. (In 2003 I did a survey of images in Wikipedia articles, where images aren't even used for decoration, and still found that alt="" would be the most sensible choice for 77 percent of them.) So for that 95 percent, assuming that no alt is alt="" would improve the user experience. Unfortunately, the other 5 percent would ruin the idea. When screenreaders are wading through inaccessibly-written pages, sometimes images are used for navigation (graphical menus, for example), so the user needs an indication that an image is there (whereupon they can guess its function by its URI). Assuming that all these images had alt="" would make such pages completely unnavigable. -- Matthew Thomas http://mpt.net.nz/
Received on Thursday, 6 January 2005 00:14:42 UTC