Re: When to display alt + image

>When this came up before, the sense of the meeting in the User Agent 
>Guidelines Group was that there are at least two articulable 
>disability conditions where simultaneous display of image and ALT 
>should be available. These are low-vision cases and people with 
>certain cognitive difficulties.

These groups should use title. alt should remain a replacement.

>The general model that appears to fill all needs is that the 
>device-independent semantic model recognizes the correspondence; and 
>behavior such as replace vs. show both is view control that should 
>ultimately lie in the user's span of control, even 'though it is 
>supplied with default ordering from the author side.

alt should remain a replacement. These highly unusual cases should 
not be accommodated by altering the default interpretation of an 
image *alternative* text. These groups-- and only a minority of 
low-vision or cognitively-disabled people are affected-- can and 
should rely on title.

Also, you're forgetting that attempting to simultaneously display an 
image and an alt text of up to 1K characters in length will destroy 
page layout. Not only will designers actively rebel, destroying page 
layout makes pages hard to understand, particularly for... low-vision 
and cognitively-disabled people.

Every conceivable function should not be collapsed on one text 
equivalent when we've got three to work with.
-- 
   Joe Clark | joeclark@joeclark.org | <http://joeclark.org/access/>
   Accessibility articles, resources, and critiques

Received on Friday, 7 December 2001 19:10:36 UTC