ALT adder form [was RE: Censorship by laziness]

MacK-- I tried your mockup.  Good Going!

We've now got two threads about tools from:

	a. "ALT tools" about the cooperative effort for volunteers to
create alt tags

	b. "ALT adder form"  which I'm starting here, about an
application which 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.  This started
as a discussion thread, and then MacK
  took it out of the realm of theory and mocked it up!

I attached the last email on this since the new thread name didn't start
till now.

Here's some suggestions:


1.  As for that problem with pages: one way to hack around that is to
change the form tags that were already there to e.g
  <xxxFORM>
  </xxxFORM>

and also replace submit buttons with something like<!-- submit
placeholder --> [SUBMIT: value] where value is what appears on regular
submit buttons.

Then, after the user sends this back, these placeholders get turned back
into what they were.
Of course, if you are parsing the form, a more elegant method would be
possible.

2. Forms also have <INPUT Type=IMAGE>  that need to be labeled.
Actually, as I read HTML 3.2, there isn't any ALT text for this field,
but I believe that some browsers will read the VALUE button  (I'm not
sure which ones... I think maybe Lynx, PwWebspeak,  MarcoPolo.  Someone
keep me honest here).

3. Need some sort of little icon next to the ALT text input fields so
that people can quickly spot them and distinguish them from other
fields.
 
4.  need to label the ALT text in the <AREA> parts of client side image
maps.  Putting on the image map would be hard, at least in HTML 3.2.
With the new Netscape browser you can position things on a layer...
might make it possible.    In principle, in HTML 3.2, you could have a
table below the image, the same size as the image, with the labels
positioned within the table approximately where they are in the image. 

5. There was Harvey's suggestion that if an image is repeated, that
putting it in one automatically updates the others, at least as default.

6. There was also Henrik's note that he had a robot that would find the
pages with missing web pages, that could be combined with this  (per
Matt's original suggestion).  I added that at the bottom of this email.


Whew!

Now that I've piled on these extra suggestions is there something I can
do to help implement them?  What did you write this in?

Len



All opinions expressed here are my own, not necessarily those of my
employer.
=============================================================
kasday@att.com         phone 732 949 2693

Leonard R. Kasday
Room 1J-316A
AT&T Laboratories
101 Crawfords Corner Rd.
Holmdel NJ 07733

========================================

The rest of this is attached notes from previous postings.

Here's is a copy of Henriks note on his robot.

from frystyk@w3.org

I got a note from Judy that you were discussing ALT tags - hope this
helps:

My libwww robot [1] does the basics needed, I think. It finds all the
references to images that do not have ALT tags and lists them in a
simple
file format like this

	<linked found here> --> <pointer to the image>

like

	http://www.w3.org	--> http://www.w3.org/icons/w3c

would say that the icon "http://www.w3.org/icons/w3c" was referenced
using
an <IMG> tag from the page "http://www.w3.org" without an ALT tag.

It also has the capability of actually downloading the images as it goes
along.

The nice thing is that it traverses the web sites much faster than any
other robot that I know of because it uses HTTP/1.1 [2] in a clever way
[3]
which also puts a lot less pressure on the server.

Henrik

[1] http://www.w3.org/Robot/
[2] http://www.w3.org/Protocols/
[3] http://www.w3.org/Protocols/HTTP/Performance/Pipeline.html
--
Henrik Frystyk Nielsen,
World Wide Web Consortium
http://www.w3.org/People/Frystyk


======================
Here is MacK's note



> ----------
> From: 	mack@sonicon.com[SMTP:mack@sonicon.com]
> Sent: 	Thursday, January 22, 1998 6:41 PM
> To: 	w3c-wai-ig@w3.org
> Subject: 	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 Friday, 23 January 1998 19:01:59 UTC