- From: Matt Morgan-May <mattmay@adobe.com>
- Date: Tue, 27 May 2008 14:56:31 -0700
- To: "L. David Baron" <dbaron@dbaron.org>, John Foliot <foliot@wats.ca>
- CC: "'Maciej Stachowiak'" <mjs@apple.com>, "'Karl Groves'" <karl.groves@ssbbartgroup.com>, "'Andrew Sidwell'" <w3c@andrewsidwell.co.uk>, <public-html@w3.org>, "'W3C WAI-XTECH'" <wai-xtech@w3.org>, <wai-liaison@w3.org>, "'HTML4All'" <list@html4all.org>
On 5/27/08 1:59 PM, "L. David Baron" <dbaron@dbaron.org> wrote: > So you're saying that you prefer people litter their meaningful > images with alt="" so that it's harder to distingush the meaningful > ones without useful alternate text from those that are purely > decorative? If the alternative is having to distinguish between those two cases and a third case where @alt was simply ignored, then yes, "littering," as you put it, is preferable. However, your argument appears to be based on a belief that the majority of authors would rather create bogus alt text to satisfy the validator than create usable alt text, which is a theory I strongly dispute. > Would you agree that something like alt="[PHOTO]" or alt="[IMAGE]" > would be better for users in that case than alt=""? Photo, maybe, and only if it is, in fact, a photograph. Image, no, since that's what screen readers announce anyway. This approach (or "_none", or any other overloading of the content of @alt) also has implications for i18n, as well as existing assistive technology, which will read out loud whatever is specified without parsing it. > If so, would you agree that it's worth standardizing what should be > used to mark such a case rather than having authors pick "[IMAGE]" > or "[PHOTO]" or their own variant? I don't see the value in taking what should be a token and throwing it into an attribute of type text. It strikes me as lazy. - m
Received on Tuesday, 27 May 2008 21:57:39 UTC