- From: Henri Sivonen <hsivonen@iki.fi>
- Date: Sun, 20 Apr 2008 11:23:51 +0300
- To: Steven Faulkner <faulkner.steve@gmail.com>
- Cc: "public-html@w3.org WG" <public-html@w3.org>, "W3C WAI-XTECH" <wai-xtech@w3.org>, wai-liaison@w3.org
On Apr 18, 2008, at 11:07, Steven Faulkner wrote: >> No. Now you are being so dogmatic about the alt attribute being there >> that you are willing to suggest modal UI to work around it. That's >> bad. >> > There is dogma on both sides of the debate, you appear more dogmatic > about the idea of alt as optional, than I am to it being required, I > have publically stated that I am as yet unconvinced of the > desirability of a required alt. There is obviuosly no doubt in your > mind. I can be persuaded with empirical data. There has now been a decade-long experiment with making alt a syntax requirement. I think this experiment shows that doing so has the downside of inducing bogus alt. When validation has downsides, as a validator developer, I want to work to remove the downsides. It may be that there's a greater upside and that a situation that polarizes results but has a greater upside is better even if it also moves the downside further from neutrality. However, absent data about this, I think it is reasonable to default to removing the downside. Also, I think the Image Review feature I have implemented in Validator.nu works better than merely flagging missing alt as a validation error would for validator users who want to maximize an accessibility measure. It remains to be seen how it affects validator users who don't care about an accessibility measure and are seeking to maximize a syntactic correctness measure. In general, if you want people to maximize function f(), it is safer to tell them to do so than to tell them to maximize a more appealing function g() and then try to build an artificial correlation between the two. Because then people are really maximizing g() and if your artificial correlation setup isn't working, well, oops. So if your agenda is accessibility, the advocacy should be "accessibility, accessibility"--not "validity, validity" with an added attempt to tie them together. > There already are "modal UI's" for most aspects of screen readers > content presentation, i think it is the nature of presenting visual > UI's non visually or non linear content linearly. A modal non-visual UI may be easier to invent, but in a non-visual UI it is also harder to tell what mode you are trapped in, so I don't think it is necessarily OK to introduce more modality even if there already is some. It appears that VoiceOver tries to avoid modality (apart from the VO key lock) just like visual Apple user interfaces. -- Henri Sivonen hsivonen@iki.fi http://hsivonen.iki.fi/
Received on Sunday, 20 April 2008 08:24:33 UTC