[html4all] the alt attribute debate

[Steven Faulkner]

Hi Henri

>It has been stated over and over. It's not like no one has said it.
>I'll try to say it again:

Many of us including your good self seem to be having trouble hearing
what others are saying

As have written in response to you on a number of occasions it is not simply
JAWS that reads out the a filename (if the image is the sole content of a
link) in response to no alt it is also the other major screen reader window
eyes and for all i know quite a few others.

and these AT are following UAAG:
http://www.w3.org/TR/UAAG10-TECHS/guidelines.html#tech-missing-alt


>(And again, the premise is that bogus alt text is worse than no alt
>text in the long run when JAWS is fixed not to read file names that
>are not suited for reading.)

This premise has not been sufficiently tested (actually to my knwoledge, no
testing that has been published has been done by proponents of the alt
change, so this premise is based on supposition), but as my initial testing
results revealed much of what you call bogus alt text on images can actually
provide some useful information about the image. What needs to be done is
more research and hey lets do something novel, lets go and ask the users
what they find useful.


On 24/09/2007, Henri Sivonen <hsivonen at iki.fi> wrote:
>
> On Sep 23, 2007, at 01:58, John Foliot - WATS.ca wrote:
>
> > Creating a spec that condones images without alternative text might
> > make
> > life easier for indifferent content creators, it does *NOTHING* to
> > improve
> > accessibility - and I have seen nothing from anyone to counter that
> > assertion.
>
> It has been stated over and over. It's not like no one has said it.
> I'll try to say it again:
>
> By decoupling syntactic correctness from simplistic machine-
> assessable accessibility testing, an incentive to pollute the non-
> visual user experience with bogus alt text is removed.
>
> (And again, the premise is that bogus alt text is worse than no alt
> text in the long run when JAWS is fixed not to read file names that
> are not suited for reading.)
>
> --
> Henri Sivonen
> hsivonen at iki.fi
> http://hsivonen.iki.fi/
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> List_HTML4all.org mailing list
> http://www.html4all.org/wiki
>



-- 
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
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://wilbur.bytowninternet.com/pipermail/list_html4all.org/attachments/20070924/75871040/attachment.html