On Sep 24, 2007, at 15:54, Steven Faulkner wrote:
As have written in response to you on a number of occasions it is
not simply JAWS that reads out the a filename (if the image is the
sole content of a link) in response to no alt it is also the other
major screen reader window eyes and for all i know quite a few others.
Yes, I have noticed that.
The point is that no one has so far explained why that behavior
(which is awful in some situations as you have demonstrated) would be
the permanent end state of development for AT and not just a
transient usability bug that is fixable in a handful of
implementations. For example, VoiceOver plus Safari on Mac OS X 10.4
do not share this usability bug, which trivially demonstrates that it
is possible to construct AT that doesn't have the usability bug.
On the other hand, there being images without human-authored alt text
seems to be permanent badness instead of a transient problem. It is a
problem that has been there from the beginning of the Web and shows
no signs of getting solved. Moreover, it is easy to contemplate new
situations where some satisfaction (for sighted people) can be
derived from a workflow (keyboardless camera that uploads to Web
immediately) that leaves no realistic opportunity for writing
alternative text. (When there's some satisfaction to be had for a
notable group of people, people will want to do it, which is why I
wouldn't expect people to refrain from such workflows for
accessibility considerations.)
and these AT are following UAAG: http://www.w3.org/TR/UAAG10-TECHS/
guidelines.html#tech-missing-alt
I'm aware of that guideline. I also posit that the guideline taken as-
is is bad, because there are a lot of real file names out there that
lead to awful usability when read out load. At minimum, AT should
check that the filename to be read has some minimal traits of
readability in the language of the speech synthetizer.
(We shouldn't take stuff under /TR/ as holy writ set in stone when
following it clearly leads to worse usability than doing something
smarter.)
This premise has not been sufficiently tested (actually to my
knwoledge, no testing that has been published has been done by
proponents of the alt change, so this premise is based on
supposition),
That's because it seems so clear to a software developer like me that
AT software could relatively easily be written to surpass bogus alt
text in quality. That's why I'd be interested in hearing why AT
couldn't be improved as suggested below.
(Relative ease above is relative to the ease of making content
providers abandon the kind of workflows where human-written alt text
is not one of the products of the workflow.)
but as my initial testing results revealed much of what you call
bogus alt text on images can actually provide some useful
information about the image.
Examples of what *I* call bogus alt text are:
""
"image"
"photo"
"DSC5413.jpg"
"IMG8329"
"" has the problem of colliding with the way of indicating that the
presence of the image should be suppressed from non-visual rendering
entirely.
"image" and "photo" as part of content are worse than "image" or
"photo" as AT-generated speech, because they take
away the opportunities for AT to improve and innovate on how to
effectively communicate the presence of an image without proper
alternative text. Examples of what AT could do above the baseline are
saying "image" or "photo" in the chrome voice instead of the content
voice (when the AT has different voices for chrome and content) and
using a audio que that plays faster than those words in the content
voice.
"DSC5413.jpg" and "IMG8329" are worse than e.g. "image" or "photo"
said in the chrome voice, because they take a relatively long time to
read, tell nothing about the image except that it probably came from
a digital camera and *if* you are able to memorize the numbers as you
go (a big "if"), you may be able to distinguish images from each
other as you navigate around.
What I'm talking about isn't rocket science as doesn't involve AI-
complete UAs describing images to people.
What needs to be done is more research and hey lets do something
novel, lets go and ask the users what they find useful.
That's a good idea. However, I get a feeling that users may not have
a good grasp of what kind of ideas would be implementable and,
therefore, eligible to be suggested.
--
Henri Sivonen
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://hsivonen.iki.fi/
