[html4all] 5 gears in reverse - anne v k enters the alt attribute debate

[Leif Halvard Silli]

On 2007-09-24 04:42:14 +0200 "Charles McCathieNevile" <chaals at opera.com> wrote:

> If alt is optional in HTML 5, but required by WCAG, then people who care  
> about accessibility will do the 10 minutes work usually required, and it  
> will be clear whether the rest of the people did that or just stuffed some  
> random attribute in.

If @ALT is made optional, the news will spread as fire in dry gras. I can allready how it will be received ... « ... the W3 finally realised ...»

> So I don't *believe*  that 
> insisting on a tool putting "something" there is that helpful. I do  believe 
> that any tool that doesn't allow a user to say "leave blank" for  alt="", 
> something useful, or just skip it altogether and not add an alt,  and make it 
> easier to skip than to add a blank, is actively harmful to  accessibility, 
> but because alt="placeholder" is as bad as anything else  possible, I am not 

It would be great to find one such page where the UA generated text was better ...

At any rate, it seems reasonable to require from author tool that they must _trigger_ the author for more spesific alt texts for any image that has a @alt text which is identical to another @alt text. That should be just as simple as to trigger for input on images without any alt at all - yeah, for a text editor user, it should be simpler (unless you are quite clever with RegEx).

Wouldn't 100 enumerated placeholder texts be better than 100 equally named?

> convinced that tools must, in general, insist on the  user putting something 
> there since they will end up puttting their own,  slightly harder to detect, 
> dummy text.

But people know that there is difference between paying lipservice and really do the thing.

Why don't we rather say that alt is required but start to identify even more spesific rules and ideas about how it should be used? For instance, I believe that autogenerated texts can be useful, but they need to be more contextual. For instance, Flickr, photobucket and what they are all named, have the consept of photocollections, and, as a minimum, offer the users to ad enumeratd alt text for all images in a collection, would be a good thing I think.

We are only discussing this on a theoretical level. I am pretty sure that if we really look at it, then then there are several users of ALT where you would say that it _must_ be there. We tried to look at Flickr in Public HTML, but where was those pages that had benefited from noALT? (But as soon as we tried to look at something spesific, that was critisised too.) And what is the situation you talk about - Charles? We agreed that Anne had no good example of an image where it could be omitted - and I suppose he uses an text editor. There are many that uses text editors. But personally, I have yet to own a text editor that can help e.g. enumerate a bunch of images. The author situation/use case of «giving alt text to collections of images at once» should be identified and advice be given what functionalites should offer for such cases.
-- 
leif halvard silli