heuristic tests not in guidelines

Here is one that just occurred to me.

Suppose a Bobby-like screening tool were to check for ALT=SRC.

This is most often an ALT text that a tool has generated, and
again in the main the author could have done better if she thought
about it for a minute.

I was thinking that pages where all ALTs that were present were
of this form would be in my screening bucket of pages we should
try the text-equiv techniques on.

This case is interesting to me, because it seems appropriate to
me for Bobby to emit a warning on detecting ALT=SRC, but I don't
see this as something that rises to "guidelines" level of
significance.  I don't see the Page Author Recommendation
forbidding this equality.  Particularly when the SRC is a simple
relative URL, so it might be an OK ALT after all.

This puts into question the idea that Bobby should check "the
guidelines, and nothing but the guidelines."

What do people think of this?

Al

Received on Sunday, 25 October 1998 20:39:13 UTC