- From: James Graham <jg307@cam.ac.uk>
- Date: Fri, 11 Apr 2008 22:52:05 +0100
- To: Katie Haritos-Shea <ryladog@earthlink.net>
- CC: Ian Hickson <ian@hixie.ch>, John Foliot <foliot@wats.ca>, 'Dave Singer' <singer@apple.com>, 'HTML4All' <list@html4all.org>, wai-xtech@w3.org, 'HTML WG' <public-html@w3.org>
Katie Haritos-Shea wrote: > >> There are people who upload literally thousands of photos a week. If a >> photo takes one minute to describe, which is probably optimisic, that's >> two full days' worth of work per week just to describe the photos. That's >> not happening. Even people who upload 10 photos a month don't care enough >> to describe their photos. >> >> You might be able to get some people to describe some of the most popular >> photos, but there's no way that's going to scale to all photos on all >> photo galleries, so the problem of what to do with photos that have no >> useful alternative text will always exist. >> >> -- >> Ian Hickson > > > Which is a good reason why alt text needs to be required by this spec > (HTML5). > > People will continue to commit crimes and break the law........but it > that a reason not to have them? It might well be a good reason not to have a particular law if it is symptomatic of that law being a sub-optimal way of addressing the underlying problem that it tries to solve. See also [1] for some more on this and apropos examples. In this particular case it's not entirely clear what effect changing the conformance requirements would have. For example, a validation warning might be just as effective as an error at reminding people that care about accessibility to include alt text, whilst preventing people who will just do the simplest thing to pass automated conformance checks from including spurious, unhelpful, values. As a side effect UAs implementing automated image analysis procedures such as [2] to try and fill in the gaps for their users would be more effectively able to key off missing alt as a sign that the automated analysis should be performed and empty alt as a sign that the image did not require alternate text. I do not claim this is the only possible outcome of the spec text as it stand. But it is a fallacy to say that because a certain idea was conceived to fulfill a given use case we must not change the feature because the use case has not been addressed as successfully as we would like. [1] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-html/2008Feb/0255.html [2] http://pubs.iupr.org/DATA/2007-IUPR-25Jul_1615.pdf -- "Mixed up signals Bullet train People snuffed out in the brutal rain" --Conner Oberst
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