- From: Remco <remco47@gmail.com>
- Date: Mon, 10 Aug 2009 05:05:03 +0200
On Mon, Aug 10, 2009 at 4:13 AM, Benjamin Hawkes-Lewis<bhawkeslewis at googlemail.com> wrote: > On 10/08/2009 02:22, Silvia Pfeiffer wrote: >> >> E.g. when you tab onto a<video> ?element, the "alt" tag could give a >> very brief summary as to what the video is about, e.g. "Elephant >> Dreams video". > > Don't the following already do that: > > 1. <video title="Elephant Dreams video" ... > > 2. <h3 id="elephants">Elephant Dreams video</h3><video > aria-labelledby="elephants" ... > > 3. <video aria-label="Elephant Dreams video" ... > > What would "alt" add here? > > -- > Benjamin Hawkes-Lewis > > A title is a short description, and could be the movie title in the case of a video element. An alt is a textual alternative for the content. It conveys the same meaning as the img, audio, video, iframe, ... element. It doesn't describe the content: it *is* the content. For an image this usually works well. An image usually doesn't convey a lot of meaning. It can be replaced by a simple sentence like "A young dog plays with a red ball on the grass.". For video, audio, object, iframe, this is a little sparse. Shortening Elephants Dream's content to "An old man and a young boy walk through a surrealistic world and have a conversation." doesn't tell you a lot about the content. But it is very helpful if the content is not available. It is even more helpful if it isn't as short as the previous alt-text for Elephants Dream. If it gives more details about what you see and hear in the video, you get information that for example a plot description doesn't provide. But Elephants Dream may not be a good example for a video where an alt text would be useful. It's simply too complicated to replace with alternative text. But if you have a short video that explains something on Wikipedia, it would be tremendously helpful if the alt text would convey the same meaning. A video of a ball falling to show what gravity is, could have the alt text: "A ball accelerates as it moves down. Next to the ball's trajectory, a speedometer increases with 9.8 m/s per second.". Remco
Received on Sunday, 9 August 2009 20:05:03 UTC