[html4all] Omitting alt Attribute for Critical Content Wiki page

[aurélien levy]

Hi,

I am not Gez but here is my opinion on that subject :
I think the flicker example is a wrong argument because it's not a 
really problem to have a an empty alt the only concern is if the photo 
is in a link to download it. Otherwise we already have meta data like 
tags and title  and description.
Flickr is used as a photo sharing website so I can use it with two 
different goals :
- search photo with a specific word to download it
- search photo with a specific word to look at it
- look and or download my friend photo

If I don't provide meta data on my photo nobody can reach it, if the 
photo have meta data and is in a link to download it I have to put in 
the alt something like "download this picture - jpg  - xx Ko" because 
the meta data are already on the page and there is only one picture by page.

In the case where user want to "look" at photo my only concern is not to 
have an alt it's to have a good meta data description and good 
description must be used with longdesc and longdesc can link to an 
#description anchor where the description is in the page. For the alt I 
just can take title, tags, or generic word as "photo"

If I don't provide description blind user can't "look" at the picture 
but at minimum they can know the subject of the photo with tags or title 
and if they just really want to "look" they will go on picture who have 
a good description.
(Flickr can provide a search form who search only in the description 
meta data to help that)

Aurélien Levy


> Hi Gez,
> I do think there are situations where the user will not provide
> (although they should) alt texts. the example cited in the HTML 5 spec
> is that of bulk uploads to photosites. What is to be done in this
> case?