[html4all] alt Flickr and iPhoto/dot Mac

[Robert J Burns]

Hello 4all,

I'm interested in the hearing the views of this group on the topic I  
recently raised of the age-old Flickr example. I switched it from  
Flickr to iPhoto/dot Mac because that is what I am familiar with, and  
Smylers acknowledged on the WG list that it is substantially the same  
example.

The thread starts here[1], but my point was essentially that the  
Flickr example doesn't hold water. In light of the newly drafted IMG  
section I wonder if the drafters and others could comment on this  
concrete example. Essentially I argue that the iPhoto/ dot Mac  
authoring faces no such dilemma, as so often argued. Instead, the  
implementors of the iPhoto/dot Mac authoring tool have all the  
information they require to produce a conforming and accessible web  
page using the titles either generated by the application or titles  
further improved and made more human readable by the authors  
themselves. Either way it should be simple to produce an HTML5 web  
document — and web application in this case — that is accessible,  
conforming and automating the bulk upload of photos.

So my curiosity relates to two things:

1) if we apply the tenets of the newly re-drafted image element and  
the related alt best practices to this iPhoto/dot Mac example does it  
overcome the often cited Flickr objections.
2) I'd like to hear from assistive technology users what the current  
situation is in using this photo gallery[2]. My sense is that Apple  
has gone way too far with javascript and — aside from the other  
frustrations and degraded user experience that creates — I'm concerned  
that it may also be thoroughly inaccessible (leaving aside the issue  
of human-unfriendly image titles like IMG_1234.JPG). So if others  
could check how JAWS and VoiceOver, etc. does with this site, I'd be  
interested in hearing the results.

Just to clarify the titles of the images could be improved (by me in a  
manual and potentially cumbersome process). However, my
interest is in assessing the overall accessibility of the application/ 
documents when relying only on the bulk processing of the photos. My  
sense is that this example shows that requiring appropriate alt values  
places no insurmountable burden on the implementors of such bulk  
automated authoring tools nor necessarily on the authors using those  
tools (where I'm free to add meaningful titles to as many of the  
photos as I'd like with each one improving the accessibility and  
overall usability of my photo galleries).

Take care,
Rob


[1]: <http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-html/2008May/ 
0034.html> with a few replies in May
       <http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-html/2008May/thread.html 
 >
[2]: <http://gallery.mac.com/robburns1#gallery>
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