Posted by Neredbojias on 04/24/07 12:16

On Sun, 22 Apr 2007 06:32:51 GMT Jukka K. Korpela scribed:

> 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="".

This argument boils down to nothing more than a least-common-denominator
approach in more ways than one. Alt ext is baggage which in many cases
is unnecessary, and my proposed default is not alt="" but its elimination
entirely. Sure there are times when it is important and desirable, but
stating that a large percentage of web authors currently choose to ignore
this fact does little to persuade me of its value in modern superfluous
contexts.

Some video media has close-captions, some doesn't. While this isn't an
analogy, it does show that an option exists and is utilized with minimal
criticism.

--
Neredbojias
He who laughs last sounds like an idiot.

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