- From: William Loughborough <love26@gorge.net>
- Date: Fri, 08 Jun 2007 09:15:31 -0700
- To: w3c-wai-gl@w3.org, oedipus@hicom.net, sean@miscoranda.com, chaals@opera.com
http://inamidst.com/patterns/StyleIsContent makes it very clear why
1.1.1 needs attention. The use of the term "pure decoration" and the
glossary example "The cover page of a dictionary has random words in
very light text in the background." underline the problem with this
concept. The only reason for allowing null alt-text ("") is to allow the
screen reader an easy way to remain silent as to the real
purpose/content of the supposedly "serving only an aesthetic purpose,
providing no information, and having no functionality" and this is
actually nonsense because even an "aesthetic purpose" cannot possibly be
"providing no information" or "having no functionality" or it wouldn't
be there.
The drawback to this silence is that one cannot know whether the author
merely disdained furnishing proper alt-text or if she arbitrarily
decided that the reasons for including non-functional materials (surely
that's oxymoronic?) transcended the inconvenience of making the screen
reader spout excess verbiage.
Because alt-text has been called the "poster child of accessibility" it
is vital that its inclusion be essentially forced on authors through
guidelines/criteria/examples.
Love.
Received on Friday, 8 June 2007 16:15:51 UTC