Re: Censorship by laziness

HB: Comments by Harvey Bingham
At 11:00 1998/01/22 -0500, Al Gilman (ASG:)wrote:
>to follow up on what Kasday, Leonard said:
>
>> 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.
>> 
HB: If an IMG is reused, presumably the first entry of ALT text should be
used throughout by default, subject to override on subsequent occurrences.
Scope would initially be the document, for the editing tool. The particular
case I have in mind is reuse of graphic bullets on lists, possibly for color
coding. Tens of these in a document would make editing a chore. I wonder
what fraction of images are multiply used: in one document? across a family
of docuements?

HB: Preferably we should have some ALT text actually associated with the
image, and allow attachment of it to the image itself, and allow an author (or
repairer) or agent for such to seek the missing ALT value from there. 

HB: Does the image creator have the insight to add descriptive text,
either ALT or long, adequate for the context where that image is referenced?
Having default descriptions associated with the image would not replace the
desirable inclusion of the ALT value at each reference to the IMG, but would
only provide a default value to get text for the alt value.

>[snip]
>> 
>> Of course, building this into web tools, would be best.
>
>ASG::
>
>The eventual goal is that it is intrinsic in the formats and
>automatic in all the tools.

HB: Reused IMG would by default have the ALT text associated directly with the
image format. I gather that is what ASG means. Currently there is no way
to make that association as part of the IMG format in most [all?] formats.
>
>In the mean time we have walk-before-run scenarios to develop.
>
>I like Leonard's idea of combining a bad-page search engine with
>a swift-fix authoring station.  It will have more zing if you are
>demonstrating how easy it is to fix arbitrary pages pulled at
>semi-random off the Web.  Not canned toy examples.
>
HB: The set of URLs referenced as IMG SRC could be extracted from a document,
and for multiply used ones the first ALT value added could be used for each
of the others as well.

HB: A mode of display that turns back off the display of all IMG with ALT
and shows instead the ALT text would be useful during the repair process.

>People who can contribute components for such a demo should talk
>to Liddy <liddy@rmit.edu.au> about WWW7.
>
>-- Al Gilman
>
Regards/Harvey Bingham

Received on Friday, 23 January 1998 02:54:23 UTC