[html4all] alt Flickr and iPhoto/dot Mac

[Joshue O Connor]

HI Robert,

Thanks for the heads up with this (and the kind words)

> 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).

It makes sense to me to make it very easy for the software authoring 
tools to make the provision of descriptive metadata as simple as 
possible. I also like the idea of a tool being able to intelligently 
choose what information it allows into the layer, from assessing the 
/ingredients/ (author provided descriptions/ file names etc) to deciding 
how how to present them. You are right that taking the file extension 
and using that as a human readable descriptor is useless. Clever 
mechanisms/heuristics that will allow the creation of more accessible 
content by associating images with author generated text/descriptions, 
/without/ the author even be aware that they are including @alt or a 
@longdesc, @future_att etc, also sounds like a good idea.

You also make a good point about the design of the tool itself and how 
important its role is. This is a part of the problem with the Flicker 
defense etc. This is only one tool, and also it could be viewed as a 
beta version as it is is relatively new. The tools in 10 years plus will 
be far more sophisticated (we hope) and by a combination of good design 
and a constraints based approach to how UAs /allow/ users to upload 
content and describe it, will improve the descriptive information that 
is available and therefore the quality of the accessible content.

A back door to this by mainstreaming may do it. Don't say this is /only/ 
accessibility information you are adding, but that it can be used as a 
way of cross referencing other related libraries so the more meta 
descriptors there are the better, give you better ratings in the 
interesting galleries section or whatever.

Cheers

Josh