On 8 February 2012 07:42, Anselm Hannemann <ans...@novolo.de> wrote: > I only have the problem with this "unordered" markup. > In that case we don't have any wrapper for the alt-text and it would just > follow as plain on the source-elements. > We always should have wrappers in my mind, we have this for noscript etc, too. > So why not adding <alt>my alternative text here</alt> to the spec? > > <picture alt="alternative text" src="default.jpg"> > <img alt="alternative text" src="default.jpg" /> > <source href="large.jpg" media="min-width:700px" /> > <alt>alt text <em>here</em></alt> > </picture>
If the alt text was going to be inside <picture> and contain markup, then yes, I'd say it should have its own element as well, otherwise the markup and DOM both become messy...but personally I'm not convinced. The existing alt attribute does the job (when it's actually *used*), so the only difference with this <alt> idea is being able to have text-level markup in it. How much would this improve accessibility? The current accessibility problem with the alt attribute is that authors often omit it, and an <alt> element won't change that. Plus, it would only apply to <picture> (or whatever we call it) - <img> would have to be left the way it is because it has no closing tag and therefore can't wrap the <alt> tag. > But in that cases we're now sure we don't want the solution to serve > different contents, right? > I mean if we, we should use an attributed version as we then need different > alt and title content, too. > And from discussion before that was only two people saying we don't need that. And only one person saying we do, but that's not the point. > I'd love to have *ability* (just for future use-cases which might come up and > I already would have some for tablet-devices and smartphones) to add > different media. > e.g. we could offer a cropped image for smartphone users which has another > context (maybe missing important parts of the img due to crop but it's better > for smartphone usage and still has it's right to be there as an diff.image). > Would love to hear what you all think about that? We're thinking along the same lines here. What I was getting as yesterday was that the different <source>s shouldn't necessarily have to be *literally* the same image but resized. They could be derivatives of the image (your example of cropped is good). The rule I suggest is that you must be able to successfully describe all the images with the same alt text (which goes on <picture>), so although the images are not visually identical they are semantically the same. The question is whether the <source>s can have optional alt attributes themselves so authors can more specifically describe that particular variant of the image. My hesitation only comes from wanting to keep it clean and simple, and from wanting to reinforce the requirement that the images be semantically the same.
