Re: Two comments about Before-After Demo (BAD)

This commonly-/widely-held "belief" overlooks that what is "nothing more
than noise for *THE* blind" [emphasis added] is not the case for many blind
users who want to know what's there if only to be able to discuss its
details with sighted colleagues. Because "Web user #1 is NOT Web user #2.

The onus for its voicing being an annoyance should be on the settings in the
Assistive Technology, not accounted for in the Web Content, which should be
equally available for everyone. One guy's noise is another guy's means of
making a living in Web design.

Every piece of "decorative material" is in fact, at the very least, a
guidepost that is traditionally given the "copout" treatment of the null
alt, even for those for whom the content is worth the "noise" because they
want to know how "decoration" serves to reveal structure AND the intent of
the content.

After all, who gets to decide which images are "important" - surely the
designer has already decided on their relevance, else they would not have
been included. No matter how "decorative" an element, it could very well be
informative, in many cases importantly so. We, as standards makers, should
avoid caviling to conventional ideas of "decoration as not information".

Love.

On Fri, Jan 23, 2009 at 8:57 AM, Marco Bertoni
<m.bertoni@webprofession.com>wrote:

>
> Alt text should be used when the image is important to understanding the
> content, in all other cases images are decorative. This is an important
> issue because every non essential text read by the screen reader is nothing
> more than noise for the blind.
>
> IMHO, the three images that you can see on screenshot n. 1 are decorative.
>
>