On Apr 19, 2007, at 10:47 PM, Charles McCathieNevile wrote:
...
For the various reasons discussed in this thread, I cannot think of a
real justification for making a mail client that breaks one of the
basic accessibility features that people understand better than most
others. And I can think of plenty of reasons for not doing so.
...
As Benjamin said, it's worthwhile entering alt= text when sending to
many recipients, and/or to unknown recipients; that is why alt= is
important for public Web pages (where you don't know who is going to
read a page) and for Intranets (where if a blind person joins the
company tomorrow, they shouldn't be impeded by lack of alt= text on
existing pages).
But it seems likely that the vast majority of non-spam e-mail messages
are sent to individuals who are known by the sender to be
fully-sighted. In that case putting up an interface for entering alt=
text, *just in case* the recipient gets struck blind before they get
around to reading the message, seems a bit unreasonable.
It would also be weird for a mail client to ask for alternate text for
images in HTML messages (because HTML requires it), but not for images
in multipart/mixed plain-text messages (because there's nowhere to put
it).
--
Matthew Paul Thomas
http://mpt.net.nz/
