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Posted by Jukka K. Korpela on 04/22/07 06:32
Scripsit Neredbojias:
> My point, however, is that alt text for _all_ images is ludicrous.
I wonder if you would think that way if you personally needed alt texts.
Suppose, for example, that you were forced to use a browser with the setting
"do not automatically load images" and you could load images individually
but at the cost of $1 per kilobyte.
> I have a site with a page containing 20 or so thumbnail images of van
> Gogh paintings. If the images cannot be seen (by a particular user),
> what is the purpose of providing alt text?
"Cannot be seen" is just one of the scenarios. Besides, even if you cannot
see an image, you might be able to experience them using a tactile mouse. Or
maybe you are a search engine that cannot see anything but is collecting
information about images; you might use the title attribute value, if
present, or you might try to determine the association of the image with
text around it, but the _simplest_ thing to start with is the alt attribute.
> Sure, one could contrive
> an obscure situation to conjure some meaningful connection (-such as
> the visitor has images turned off for speed but wants to see if
> anything he desires is available...)
There's nothing contrived or obscure about it. The word "obscure" applies to
an image gallery with no texts about the images. You might have captions
below images, but their association with the images is less obvious,
especially in some techniques of caption implementation. (There is no HTML
element for image captioning, so anything the authors does is a trick of a
kind.) Besides, if you have captions, it's a trivial operation to duplicate
them in alt attributes, if you don't bother doing something more advanced.
> In my opinion, alt text should have a common default which should
> probably be nothing more than it's non-inclusion.
Setting alt="" as the default would help no one; it would actually make
things worse. A large crowd of clueless or sloppy authors would omit alt
attributes no matter whether the image actually needs a nonempty alt text.
People do such foolishness even in a manner that requires some work from
them: they write alt="" (perhaps to silence validators or accessibility
checkers) for all images, including images that contain just text so that
writing the right alt text would be extremely trivial.
At present, when many browsers distinguish between alt="" and lack of any
alt text, users can at least know that authors didn't bother writing any alt
text, i.e. that the page contains an image that could be just about
anything. If alt="" were the declared default, browsers would probably act
accordingly and treat the billions of existing images without alt attributes
as if the author can explicitly said that the adequate textual replacement
for the image is the alt text.
The attitude that you express (and present in favor of defining a default
for alt attributes) is one of the key reasons why it would be a bad move to
define a default of alt="".
--
Jukka K. Korpela ("Yucca")
http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/
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