Re: ALT revisited

On Fri, 27 Jun 1997, Daniel Dardailler wrote:

> 
> > ALT represents an example of an opportunity to clean up the
> > accessibility of the Web by improving on the definition of the
> > Web media.  We may think that the problem is that the authors are
> > populating the standards wrong, but it is the standards that we
> > have the greatest leverage over.  We should not neglect a chance
> > to make the situation better by what we can change; relying on 
> > what others have to do for us should be used sparingly.
> 
> Well said, and thanks for the report.
> 
> I've always thought ALT was under-specified in the HTML spec, which
> only says something like: "For user agents that cannot display
> images, this attribute specifies alternate text."
> The "cannot" in the above sentence can be loaded with semantics..

I am struggling to bring the quality of the Cougar spec upto
the expected level, and would welcome any suggestions for what
we should include in the description of IMG, OBJECT and APPLET..

For IMG we have the ALT attribute, but could propose a further
attribute for a link to further information about the image,
e.g. ALTSRC. This has the effect of avoiding problems with down
level browsers. We can readily extend Lynx and the emacs based
browsers to support this new feature.

For OBJECT, we can advise authors how to use the content of
the OBJECT element to provide textual descriptions of images.
Note that OBJECT supports use of the <A> element to define image
maps. The anchor is extended with the SHAPE and COORDS attributes
so that the textual description along with hypertext links also
serves to define the hotzones on the image. For APPLET the course
is less clear to me. The content of the APPLET allows you to
include a textual description. There are also the guidelines for
authoring Java in a way that minimizes accessibility problems.

Any help would be much appreciated. We plan to publish the
1st draft of the Cougar spec in a few days time, so any input
now could be folded into that draft. Otherwise, there will
be time for further input before the spec reaches the proposed
recommendation status.

Regards,

-- Dave Raggett <dsr@w3.org> http://www.w3.org/People/Raggett
phone: +44 122 578 2521 (office) +44 385 320 444 (gsm mobile)
World Wide Web Consortium (on assignment from HP Labs)

Received on Monday, 30 June 1997 05:24:18 UTC