Re: Censorship by laziness

Leonard Kasday wrote:

> Matt's idea of an application that searches for images with missing alt
> text is a good one.   I'd suggest an enhancement:  An application that
> pops up the web pages that have missing alt text, and puts text entry
> fields next to each image where the ALT text is missing.    The user
> then just types in the ALT text into each field.
 
MacK::

I mocked up a tool that attempts to do this in a Web browser instead of as
a stand-alone application.  You give it a URL, it gives you back that page
wrapped in a <FORM> with text input fields by each image.  If the image
already had ALT text, that is the default value in the input field.  This
way, you can both add missing ALT text and edit existing ALT text.  At the
bottom of the form is a button that sends it off again, and you get back
the original page with the appropriate ALT text added into the image tags.

This is just a mock-up, so it doesn't do much error handling.  You'll also
notice that the corrected page you get back has broken image links because
the base URL for that page is my CGI script.  You have to overwrite the
original page with the corrected page before any relative URLs will work.

Also, pages with forms don't work at all, apparently because browsers do
not handle nested forms.  Such pages are missing the submit button at the
bottom, so they can't be used.  I suspect that nested forms are invalid
HTML, so I really should remove them.

One final caveat: please use this script only to check out how such an
application could be used.  My server can't take heavy traffic, so please
do not use this to fix up your favorite Web site.  It's just a toy at this
point.

The URL for this is http://www.sonicon.com/wai/altsform.html

Let me know what you think of it.
	- MacK.
-----
Edmund R. MacKenty
    <mack@sonicon.com>	SONICON Development, Inc.	  (1-617-926-2131)
		 http://www.sonicon.com/	    (FAX:  1-617-926-2126)

Received on Thursday, 22 January 1998 18:43:27 UTC