- From: Christophe Strobbe <christophe.strobbe@esat.kuleuven.be>
- Date: Fri, 22 Aug 2008 19:25:56 +0200
- To: W3C WAI-XTECH <wai-xtech@w3.org>
Hi, At 18:55 22/08/2008, Dave Singer wrote: >At 12:44 -0400 22/08/08, David Poehlman wrote: >>most sane tools should warn that it is missing and not pass it forcing the >>proper attention to it. @role still does not cover what can only be human >>judgements till we get machines that can parse images and make textual sense >>out of them. > >You cannot assume that the person providing input to the tool that >makes HTML was the author of the input, and you cannot assume that >there is anyone to report to at the time the HTML is being made. > >Consider a hypothetical service which takes word documents in a drop >box and later makes HTML pages. The generation happens after the >drop, the person dropping the document may not have written them >anyway, and word has no field for alt text of images. When exactly did Microsoft Word lose this feature? In my copy of Word 2002, I can insert a picture, open the "Format Picture" dialogue (through the context menu), select the Web tab and insert text in the field "Alternative text". In my copy of OpenOffice.org 2.3, I can insert a picture, open the "Picture" dialogue (through the context menu), select the Options tab and insert some text in the field "Alternative (Text Only)". I would be very surprised if more recent versions had lost these features. Best regards, Christophe Strobbe >The tool should make functional, comformant HTML. Clearly it cannot >invent alt text, and so it cannot conform to WCAG, but we should at >least make sure that consumers of the HTML are not *mis*-led >although if they cannot see images there may be semantics missing. > >alt="" role="unknown" >alt="{auto-converted}" > >something else? >(...) > >-- >David Singer >Apple/QuickTime -- Christophe Strobbe K.U.Leuven - Dept. of Electrical Engineering - SCD Research Group on Document Architectures Kasteelpark Arenberg 10 bus 2442 B-3001 Leuven-Heverlee BELGIUM tel: +32 16 32 85 51 http://www.docarch.be/ --- Please don't invite me to LinkedIn, Facebook, Quechup or other "social networks". You may have agreed to their "privacy policy", but I haven't. Disclaimer: http://www.kuleuven.be/cwis/email_disclaimer.htm
Received on Friday, 22 August 2008 17:26:50 UTC