[html4all] Unready and social engineering Re: several messages about alt

[Henri Sivonen]

On Apr 14, 2008, at 15:33, Laura Carlson wrote:
> The fact is the W3C validator is currently used as a web
> accessibility teaching tool.
>
> How do I know that? I know that because I have my students use it in
> the classes that I teach in order to flag missing alt. It is a first
> step in getting that important *message* across


If you are teaching them about writing alt text, using a suboptimal  
tool to find the missing alt instances is OK. (A proper tool for the  
purpose would be one that showed images and their alt text side by  
side for the evaluation of a sighted human operator, as it would let  
the human operator also check that the present alt text isn't bogus.)

However, teaching that making a page validate makes it accessible is  
not true. And we should avoid getting that bogus message across even  
though that message would be simple and strong.

-- 
Henri Sivonen
hsivonen at iki.fi
http://hsivonen.iki.fi/