[whatwg] Alt text authoring Re: Conformance for Mail clients (and maybe other WYSIWYG editors)

On Apr 19, 2007, at 3:47 AM, Charles McCathieNevile wrote:

> On Thu, 19 Apr 2007 01:29:39 +0200, Benjamin Hawkes-Lewis  
> <bhawkeslewis at googlemail.com> wrote:
>
>> When I make HTML mail for (solicited) wide distribution, I make  
>> sure to
>> include alt text. It's becomes especially important when clients are
>> configured to automatically convert HTML mail to text (as indeed  
>> my own
>> Thunderbird currently is). So it's not obvious to me that email
>> composing programs don't need to make it easy to add alt text.
> ...
>> Maciej Stachowiak wrote:
> ...
>>> I do think that for blogs or wikis where you are publishing to  
>>> the web
>>> audience at large, the editing tools should make it possible and  
>>> ideally
>>> even easy to add alt text. Probably not a mail client though.
>
> For the various reasons discussed in this thread, I cannot think of  
> a real justification for making a mail client that breaks one of  
> the basic accessibility features that people understand better than  
> most others. And I can think of plenty of reasons for not doing so.

I can only imagine it being useful as an advanced feature for  
experts. Normal people won't understand why a mail program would  
prompt them to type in some text about an image, that will then not  
be visible to them or their recipient.

Regards,
Maciej

Received on Thursday, 19 April 2007 04:08:33 UTC