I'd just like to point out that the alt text does benefit everyone in
situations like providing tooltip content and for when images are not able
to be downloaded/viewed. i.e. provide content for what the image would have
been if it was displayed correctly (in fact I though that this was the
reason for 'ALT' text, and it just benefitied assistive technologies like
screen readers too, not the other way around?).
Then there is the issue of what is 'meaningful' alt text, but Im not going
to touch that one.
Cheers,
Nathan
----- Original Message -----
From: "Stephen Stagg" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: "WSG" <wsg@webstandardsgroup.org>
Sent: Wednesday, December 14, 2005 3:57 AM
Subject: [WSG] positive-discrimination === not positive and IMG properties
<rant comment="please correct me if I'm wrong about anything">
Why should Text mode browsers benefit from the ALT property when Graphical
agents can't?
I understand that this is planned to change in future specifications
but....
Why does the IMG element have an alt property? why not define a label
property instead (and longlabel) or caption property. This would make the
semantics more readable AND would allow CSS to be non-discriminative. The
problem with an ALT prop. is that it stands for 'Alternate Text' this
means that, at present, designers are having to go out of their way to
cater for disabled people and machine-based readers by adding hidden
content, while this is not 'a bad thing', it is not going to encourage
people to bother.
Also, User-Agents won't display the text because there is a better
alternative available. What book/magazine prints pictures without labels
or descriptions?
If the property name was comment or label, then designers and content
managers would see the property as a semantic and presentational benefit.
Also, CSS properties could be defined to allow styling of the label
alongside the image in graphical browsers as well as in text mode
browsers. Therefore people are more aware of the benefits of labeling
images, Designers would be encouraged to design according to good
publishing practices and (hopefully) disabled people would benefit from
more widespread accessibility.
</rant>
BTW. does anyone know a good way of stylistically adding labels to images?
At the moment i'm using:
<p class="image" title="!label!">
<img src="!URI!" alt="!label!"/><span class="label">!label!</span>
</p>
is this right? what do you suggest?
Stephen Stagg.
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