On Sun, 23 Sep 2007 17:00:11 +0200, Steven Faulkner
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
The HTML5 draft does not allow no alt attribute for any image. It's
actually a MUST level requirement to provide it for most and a SHOULD
for images with critical content.
from the draft spec the reason you give for not providing an alt text
does not appear to fit
"the alt attribute should only be omitted when no alternative text is
available and none can be made available, e.g. on automated image gallery
sites."
http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/multipage/section-embedded.html#the-img
You could have provided alts for the images, but chose not to.
I suppose I could have, though my site does fit in that category. (It's
automated and does not support insertion of replacement text at the
moment.) It's also not really clear to me what description would be
adequate enough, but that's a separate issue.
This would take too much time for little benefit" then their pages will
be be
both valid and conformant.
Correct. Note that this would be true for <img alt=""> as well except that
there the end user does not know there's an image at all on the site and
therefore can't ask software or maybe a real person to describe the image
for him.
BTW Don't you think it a little odd that the draft
tells authors that they MUST have the alt attribute on meaningless
images but makes it optional on those with meaning that is critical
content?
This seems to fit with the way <img> has been designed and is implemented.
I'm not really sure if anything else is possible unless there's an
algorithm that can tell you whether an image is meaningless or not and I
don't think that's possible.
Regarding no alt= attribute, that indeed seems to be case. Which is why
we might want to try something else instead. On the other hand, going
out
from the current state of the art of screen readers doesn't really help
solving this problem I think. Dunno really.
yes i think something else is definitley needed. something to explicitly
flag images that have the alt attribute omitted for those reasons that
are cited in the spec.
Hopefully image interpretation software gets better soon. That will
hopefully solve the real problem here which is that a lot of authors don't
really have an incentive other than "search engine optimization" to
provide replacement text for images. (I'm not a big believer in requiring
such things by law, etc.)
--
Anne van Kesteren
<http://annevankesteren.nl/>
<http://www.opera.com/>
