- From: Michele Diodati <michele.diodati@gmail.com>
- Date: Fri, 7 Jan 2005 19:11:02 +0100
- To: w3c-wai-gl@w3.org
Chris Ridpath <chris.ridpath@utoronto.ca> wrote: > > Think to a menubar: alt text for every image is > > an alternative text for it, not a description. > This is the way things are done now. I'm proposing that we change a bit. > > If the menu button was a picture of scissors the alt text should be > "scissors". The title would be "cut". User agents could tell the user "cut" > and "picture of scissors". It seems to me your proposal adds an unnecessary cognitive burdening. Accessibility for non visual users has to aim at keeping as low as possibile noise in the content. For example, a sighted chess player may find pretty and funny a web page containing a graphical sophisticated chessboard, as long as he can easily distinguish the pawns from the bishops or the rooks from the queens, and play with ease his game. But the same chessboard and the same chess set can become very problematic, if you presume to describe with alt texts every single snip in the graphic environment of the page. A blind chess player wants simply know that the queen pawn moved to D4! All the rest is noise. So I think alt texts, if they have to be valid substitutes for images (as requested in [1]), should contain the smallest piece of information meaningful enough to allow non-visual users to understand the content and use it to the best advantage. To this end, in some cases we may need to put in alt texts a description of the image content, in some cases we rather may need to put in them a description of the image function. In any case a description of the image is not necessary in order to make understandable and correctly usable the content, why not use longdesc to provide non-visual users with a full description of the graphic content? Regards, Michele Diodati -- http://www.diodati.org [1] http://www.w3.org/TR/1999/REC-html401-19991224/struct/objects.html#adef-alt
Received on Friday, 7 January 2005 18:11:34 UTC