Re: Flickr and alt

On Mon, Aug 18, 2008 at 8:25 AM, Philip TAYLOR (Ret'd)
<P.Taylor@rhul.ac.uk>wrote:

>
> Anne van Kesteren wrote:
>
>>
>> [...]I was trying to point out that Flickr cannot start requiring
>> users to <perform some task> as that will simply kill their business.
>>
>
> Exactly the same argument was adduced about requiring
> public houses to require their customers to either
> refrain from smoking completely, or to smoke outside.
>
> The pubs /didn't/ go out of business, and most of their
> customers came to accept that -- by following the rules --
> they were improving the environment for everybody.
>
> Philip TAYLOR
>


Forcing content on a user-generated content web site, by law, to meet a set
of accessibility standards is asinine and frightening at the same time.
There are plenty of countries that would never go for such a thing.

Smoking laws are a poor analogy.  A better analogy would be fining a
restaurant for not forcing everyone in a restaurant to use sign language
while they talk.

There is absolutely NO chance I would ever upload 100 photos to a web site
and write a sentence of text for each picture only to have that sentence be
invisible to 99% of the public.  If I'm going to write 100 sentences,
they're going to be captions viewable alongside a photo and not alternate
text for a photo.  For this reason, I see Flickr as a silly use case for
@alt as I can only ever foresee Flickr using this:

<figure>
<img src="image.jpg" whatever-markup-goes-here>
<legend>My wife and myself in front of the Niagra Falls, a proper
description of this image</legend>
</figure>

As this would be silly (it's redundant):

<figure>
<img src="image.jpg" alt="My wife and myself in front of the Niagra Falls, a
proper description of this image">
<legend>My wife and myself in front of the Niagra Falls, a proper
description of this image</legend>
</figure>

And this would never happen:

<figure>
<img src="image.jpg" alt="Proper alternate text I'm going to write for 100
images but is only presented when the image is not visible">
<legend>My wife and myself in front of the Niagra Falls, a proper
description of this image</legend>
</figure>

I'm also sure at least 50 of those images wouldn't get captioned at all
because I simply don't have the time.  If Flickr suddenly required me to
caption all 50 of those images, I would just insert junk into the textbox
for the caption or I would find a photo sharing site without such a silly
requirement for me, as the user.

-- 
Jon Barnett