- From: T.V Raman <raman@google.com>
- Date: Tue, 28 Jan 2014 08:52:26 -0800
- To: jason@jasonjgw.net
- Cc: wai-xtech@w3.org, w3c-wai-pf@w3.org
Jason, good point re "decorative" images being irrelevant in specific contexts. However the problem remains "decorati ve" for whom? If it were irrelevant for *all* users, then it wouldn't be there in the first place;_) Looking forward, rather than backward in time, perhaps we need to expand both the set of accessibility related attributes as well as their value space to better express the underlying intent -- for instance, an image that is purely presentational/decorative to someone who is blind might end up adding value to someone who has difficulty grasping the underlying content from the text alone. Jason White writes: > Suzanne Taylor <suzanne.taylor@pearson.com> wrote: > > Thx. It’s possible, then, that there should be two roles, one for removing > > semantics, one for marking images (and maybe other items) as > > decorative/atmospheric. The dual purpose is really awkward to explain. > > When this was discussed during the development of WCAG, the predominant > opinion was that decorative images should have alt="" so they would be ignored > by assistive technologies. If they were truly decorative, there could be no useful > information conveyed, hence no value in providing a text alternative. > > Now that we have ARIA, it would indeed be possible to add a text alternative > and to mark the images as decorative. The interesting question is whether this > is useful enough to justify implementation. How much benefit would be offered > to users, and would they be much interested in reading the text alternatives > of images which would currently be represented as alt="" for the reasons > described above? >
Received on Tuesday, 28 January 2014 16:52:54 UTC