[html4all] alt Flickr and iPhoto/dot Mac

[Robert J Burns]

Hi Gregory,

On May 11, 2008, at 6:44 PM, Gregory J. Rosmaita wrote:

> oh, and if you haven't checked out matt may's "alt the flickr  
> defense",
> it makes for some interesting reading:[1]

Thanks for the link to Matt May’s article. It was informative.  
However, my point goes beyond what Matt is saying there. My point is  
that if one actually considers best practices for alt in designing a  
site like Flickr or iPhoto/dot Mac authoring, one will quickly  
discover that this age-old Flickr example is based on a fundamental  
misunderstanding of how the alt attribute is used.

Using this iPhoto /dot Mac, I showed how the software authoring tools  
involved never need to prompt the user for the alt text. All of the  
necessary alt text can be provided by the authoring tool itself with  
no author input whatsoever. I think this is true especially in light  
of the great work Steve, Laura, and Josh did on the new re-draft of  
the image section (in action item 54).

That is not to say that authors cannot make the resulting site more  
accessible and more usable generally.  Spending more time providing  
author generated titles, author generated descriptions and other  
metadata will indeed make the site more accessible and more usable[2].  
However, the claim that an authoring tool cannot do the job of being  
both accessible and conforming — if alt is required — is completely  
false (and mistaken for not actually considering a concrete example  
such as iPhoto / dot Mac). In fact, nothing the author does changes  
how the authoring tool should generate alt text in this example  
(iPhoto could improve things too by not including the filename  
extension in the image files title property, but only the  
automatically generated filename without the extension; there's no  
reason to include a filename extension in a photograph title).

BTW Gregory, I do agree that authoring tools should extract the image  
file's description metadata to a document fragment referenced by the  
longdesc attribute. I also think HTML5 should be encouraging client  
UAs to do the same thing. Again, iPhoto / dot Mac provide an example  
of the need for this use case. Users visiting my galleries can click  
on an information button when viewing a photo to view some of the  
metadata (the machine generated metadata only, such as the shutter  
speed, f-stop ,etc). I think browsers especially should be capable of  
extracting the titles, captions and descriptions from the image file  
itself and provide it to a user upon request. Perhaps we should even  
propose new metadata properties for image formats that permit HTML  
fragments within an image file to enable semantically rich subject  
descriptions and visual descriptions.

Take care,
Rob

[1]: http://www.bestkungfu.com/archive/date/2008/05/alt-and-the-flickr-defense
[2]: After all the main thrust for Apple with iPhoto is how easy it  
makes it for authors to prepare their photos for sharing with others.  
The main focus for Apple is on such things as  cropping, rotating,  
adjusting color, adjusting brightness, etc..I think their missing much  
regarding how users also want to improve the metadata about their  
photos. However, recently they did make 'event' metadata central with  
iPhoto ensuring that every photo in an authors library has an event  
assigned to it. Unfortunately Apple maintains this metadata outside  
the image file rather than utilizing industry standard metadata  
property for 'event'. Similarly Apple does not include the description  
in the image file and is inconsistent in how it stores other  
descriptive metadata (often not using obvious IPTC properties for  
storing metadata).