RE: [LIKELY JUNK]Insight into the assumption that informs the HTML5 editors thinking on what constitutes an appropriate text alternative

We should avoid that personal habits of some users will have impacts on
the definition of general web standards.

The announcement of images as part of the page is crucial for the
understanding of page content and for moderated scenarios, written
problem descriptions in a customer service scenario and end user
documentation.

For decorative images there are already means to indicate AT to ignore
them whereas these have still the character of temporary solutions to
me.

Regards
Stefan

-----Original Message-----
From: wai-xtech-request@w3.org [mailto:wai-xtech-request@w3.org] On
Behalf Of Steven Faulkner
Sent: Freitag, 22. August 2008 13:42
To: Ian Hickson; public-html@w3.org WG
Cc: W3C WAI-XTECH; wai-liaison@w3.org
Subject: [LIKELY JUNK]Insight into the assumption that informs the HTML5
editors thinking on what constitutes an appropriate text alternative


The assumption [1] that informs the normative and informative
statements in the current HTML5 spec in regards to alt, does not take
into account a primary use case for consumers of text alternatives.

AT's such as JAWS and Window Eyes inform a user of an images presence
when an image receives virtual focus:

<img alt="some text">

announces: "graphic some text"


[1] http://krijnhoetmer.nl/irc-logs/whatwg/20080822#l-271

# [11:12] <hsivonen> Hixie: there's a chance that your assuption that
alt text should make sense when flattened as part of surrounding prose
isn't the right assumption
# [11:13] <hsivonen> Hixie: and that users would be better off getting
cued that a piece of text is an alt digression from the surrounding
prose and doesn't need to flow nicely into the paragraph
# [11:13] <Hixie> there's always a chance that i'm wrong on many things
:-)
# [11:14] <Hixie> well i don't know about AT users, but at least from
the point of view of a Lynx/Links user (which I am regularly), I
certainly wouldn't want to be told whenever there's an image, i just
want the image replaced with the text

-- 
with regards

Steve Faulkner
Technical Director - TPG Europe
Director - Web Accessibility Tools Consortium

www.paciellogroup.com | www.wat-c.org
Web Accessibility Toolbar -
http://www.paciellogroup.com/resources/wat-ie-about.html

Received on Friday, 22 August 2008 11:57:20 UTC