[html4all] New issue: IMG section of HTML5 draft contradicts WCAG 1 & WCAG 2 (draft)
Charles McCathieNevile
chaals at opera.com
Fri Apr 11 08:16:33 PDT 2008
On Fri, 11 Apr 2008 14:07:34 +0200, Philip TAYLOR
<Philip-and-LeKhanh at royal-tunbridge-wells.org> wrote:
> Charles McCathieNevile wrote:
>
>> 4. It means that all legacy testing systems will have to be rebuilt to
>> ensure that they recognise this magic string as being equivalent to not
>> having any alt attribute.
>
> It is /not/ equivalent : that is the whole point.
Ah. This is where we disagree I think. Fundamentally I don't think there
is such a case as "it is impossible to provide useful alt" - although
there are many cases of "I couldn't be bothered" and "we didn't bother
making our application support that" and "the Author didn't give any
informatin" and so on, that lead to no useful text (in which category I
include alt="") being present.
And the case where nothing useful has been provided, in the context of
getting meaningful content from an author to a user is in fact one of
those that is most important and easiest (currently) to distinguish. FWIW
I think the current HTML draft recognises this - in line with the
reocmmendations from WAI on authoring tools, evaluation mechanisms, and
dealing with this issue.
>> 1. Because that does not mean anything in most langauges of the world.
>
> It means neither more, nor less, than "Mt Fuji, the peak bathed
> in early evening sunset orange, silhouetted against a background
> of pellucid white cumulus clouds", which most of us (and I suspect
> that includes yourself) would regard as a totally acceptable ALT
> text for an image depicting that scene ...
In the right circumstances that would be a fine text.
If you are suggesting that we should generally accept any human-readable
text explaining that the author didn't provide anything, then I disagree
(there has already been a thread on default values in alt, and I don't
think there is any reasoning that hasn't been exposed).
>> 2. Because you are unlikely to come up with a complete text string that
>> people always emit correctly, and get it implemented through the various
>> tool chains in use, with anything like the same efficiency as working
>> out what the lack of an alt attribute means.
>
> Why ? These are /automated/ tools, and it is therefore trivial
> to modify them to emit a pre-agreed string in circumstances
> such as these.
Because you have to identify each such tool and convince them to follow
the new standard. Given the abject failure so far to convince most HTML
authoring tool developers to follow the relevant standards, I suspect that
"build it and they will come" is not a useful answer - having spent
several years when i worked at W3C being *one* of the people pushing tools
towards standards compliance my experience is that this is the sort of
thing that takes a lot longer to get into the tool chain than people just
doing nothing.
cheers
Chaals
--
Charles McCathieNevile Opera Software, Standards Group
je parle français -- hablo español -- jeg lærer norsk
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