- From: Jason White <jason@jasonjgw.net>
- Date: Mon, 26 Nov 2007 21:32:49 +1100
- To: wai-xtech@w3.org
On Sun, Nov 25, 2007 at 12:09:59PM -0500, Al Gilman wrote: > Please comment on this on the XTECH list. I agree with the premises and the conclusions, with qualifications and exceptions as noted below. > HTMLWG should agree that authors SHOULD provide > good text alternatives for all <img> elements as > stated in WCAG2 Guideline 1.1. I would substitute "must" for "should" here, since under both WCAG1 and WCAG2, this is a "priority 1" (respectively, "level 1") requirement, corresponding to "must" in the must/should/may trichotomy. For the pedantically inclined, and we must be precise in these matters, supplying a null value for the purpose of indicating the merely decorative status of an image does amount to specifying a value of @alt for the purposes of the preceding statements. > > WAI should agree that well-placed informative references > to existing W3C accessibility Recommendations is a > suitable way for the HTML5 specification to address this, > more or less as it has been done in the Specification Guidelines > Recommendation. I agree, and this point has applications for the HTML 5 spec that extend far beyond the microcosm of the syntactic question under discussion here. > WAI suggests that the markup pattern > > @alt="" > > is a 'cowpath' in the language of the HTML5 Principles, in that > assistive technology is already in the practice of recognizing > <img> elements with that @alt value as ignorable. > Note also that it has been suggested in WCAG techniques for a number of years. It may have been implemented in authoring tools and evaluation tools as well; the user agent/assistive technology side is only one important aspect of the software that produces and consumes HTML documents. > </position> And you still haven't answered the question posed, namely whether @alt should be required to be specified as part of the syntactic definition of <img>.
Received on Monday, 26 November 2007 10:33:16 UTC