Re: Investigating the proposed alt attribute recommendations in HTML 5

On Aug 29, 2007, at 3:12 PM, Gez Lemon wrote:

>
> Hi Jon,
>
> On 29/08/2007, Jon Barnett <jonbarnett@gmail.com> wrote:
>> One of the conclusions is that accessibility is harmed by omitting
>> @alt because JAWS will instead read the filename (or the entire @src
>> attribute).  Is it helpful that JAWS does this at all?  Is it ever
>> helpful for JAWS to simply spout out the filename of an image instead
>> of simply announcing "Embedded Graphic" for the image with omitted
>> @alt.  Regardless of conformance requirements, I'm trying to
>> understand why JAWS is doing that.
>
> If an image is used as the link phrase for a link, JAWS must be able
> to present something to the screen reader user in order for them to
> know whether or not they want to follow the link. In its default
> configuration, JAWS only announces the image name as a last resort,
> after first looking for alternate text, or text from the title
> attribute. If nothing else is available, the image name is chose, as
> it might reveal something about the image's function, such as
> pigflying.jpg.

It looks like in the case of this page, there is a title="" attribute  
on the <a> element containing the image, but not on the <img> itself: http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/sleepingcats/



> This is generally true for small websites, but,
> unfortunately, not the case for huge websites, such as image sharing
> websites where the name is generated by the system.

Actually, at least some of these sites take the filename from the  
image as uploaded, which often means it was generated by a camera  
since people don't tend to rename the individual files.

Regards,
Maciej

Received on Wednesday, 29 August 2007 22:31:24 UTC