- From: Michael A Squillace <masquill@us.ibm.com>
- Date: Thu, 29 Nov 2007 08:35:30 -0600
- To: w3c-wai-au@w3.org
- Message-ID: <OF09C62FAF.CECDFF83-ON852573A2.00501F50-862573A2.005032DB@us.ibm.com>
Is this something we should be chiming in on? --> Mike Squillace IBM Human Ability and Accessibility Center Austin, TX W:512.823.7423 M:512.970.0066 masquill@us.ibm.com www.ibm.com/able ----- Forwarded by Michael A Squillace/Austin/IBM on 11/29/2007 08:35 AM ----- "David Poehlman" <poehlman1@comcast.net> Sent by: wai-xtech-request@w3.org 11/29/2007 06:08 AM To "Jason White" <jason@jasonjgw.net>, <wai-xtech@w3.org> cc Subject Re: DRAFT response Re[3]: Request for PFWG WAI review of Omitting alt Attribute for Critical Content I guess this is not an argument for rejecting validity of alt+="", but in order to be bypassed, it will be severely abused as is the summary for tbles. ----- Original Message ----- From: "Jason White" <jason@jasonjgw.net> To: <wai-xtech@w3.org> Sent: Thursday, November 29, 2007 5:47 AM Subject: Re: DRAFT response Re[3]: Request for PFWG WAI review of Omitting alt Attribute for Critical Content On Thu, Nov 29, 2007 at 10:48:53AM +0100, Charles McCathieNevile wrote: > I think we should be clearer. > > [[[ If an image is a key part of the content, the alt attribute > must not be specified with an empty value. ]]] > > Is very important. I think we should request that a missing alt value be > considered invalid, although for accessibility reasons it is preferred to > the more serious error of marking meaningful content which requires an > alternative with alt="" I support Charles' comments. Furthermore, the most important concept is that there should be only two syntactically distinct possibilities: 1. Alt with a non-null string, providing an alternative to the image. 2. Alt with a null string, signifying that the image is an artifact of formatting. There should not be a third - an omitted alt - which ought, as Charles suggests, to trigger a syntax error that can be detected by authoring tools and markup validators. HTML generating applications (including authoring tools) should not output alt="" unless reasonable measures have been taken to ensure that the image belongs to the decorative class. This last point is an authoring tool requirement which I am sure can be handled in ATAG, if it is not there already.
Received on Thursday, 29 November 2007 14:36:12 UTC