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Results of Questionnaire Call for Consensus: Text Alternatives

The results of this questionnaire are available to anybody.

This questionnaire was open from 2010-04-20 to 2010-04-22.

24 answers have been received.

Jump to results for question:

  1. ISSUE-31 missing alt

1. ISSUE-31 missing alt

Refer to HTML5 Change Proposal: Replace img Guidance for Conformance Checkers.

Further to discussion since the face-to-face meeting in the past couple weeks, this change proposal does include that a missing text alternative should be an error in conformance checkers. We expect the error text would reference additional guidance on text alternatives in WCAG support materials.

Do you support this as a decision of the task force? If no, please indicate what changes would enable you to support this.

Summary

ChoiceAll responders
Results
Yes 21
No 2
Abstain 1

Details

Responder ISSUE-31 missing altComments
Michael Cooper Yes
Laura Carlson Yes
Janina Sajka Yes
Steve Faulkner Yes
Gez Lemon Yes
Silvia Pfeiffer Yes
Philip Jägenstedt Abstain
aurélien levy Yes
Joshue O'Connor Yes
Cynthia Shelly Yes
Gregory Rosmaita Yes
Sean Hayes Yes
Kelly Ford Yes
John Foliot Yes
Jim Allan Yes
Debi Orton Yes I agree with all the arguments put forth by the task force. The use of the alt attribute is embedded in many of the accessibility education efforts and arguably the most important of accommodations for those with visual impairments.
Marco Ranon Yes
Ben Caldwell Yes
Martin Kliehm Yes
Wendy Chisholm Yes
Eric Carlson Yes
Denis Boudreau Yes
Ian Hickson No It violates layering by making it possible for removal of ARIA to affect conformance, discourages use of semantic HTML by removing the allowance for using title="" for titles, and encourages longer markup than necessary by suggesting the use of role="presentation" to imply alt="" when alt="", which is shorter, already implies role="presentation".
David Singer No My personal comments

A) The replacement text falls far short of the editorial quality of the text it replaces.
B) Serious issue: Whether or not we say that authoring tools must generate conforming documents, anyone writing a tool would normally wish to and expect to, and may well be instructed to by their management. Being silent on the subject, as the replacement text is, will simply encourage the behavior of putting in 'nonce' values (e.g. alt="" or alt="<file-name>").
c) [Minor] one of the lines (the one about paragraphs) is already gone from the editor's draft at <http://dev.w3.org/html5/spec/Overview.html#guidance-for-conformance-checkers>

More details on responses

  • Michael Cooper: last responded on 20, April 2010 at 17:23 (UTC)
  • Laura Carlson: last responded on 20, April 2010 at 17:25 (UTC)
  • Janina Sajka: last responded on 20, April 2010 at 17:42 (UTC)
  • Steve Faulkner: last responded on 20, April 2010 at 17:50 (UTC)
  • Gez Lemon: last responded on 20, April 2010 at 22:46 (UTC)
  • Silvia Pfeiffer: last responded on 20, April 2010 at 23:38 (UTC)
  • Philip Jägenstedt: last responded on 21, April 2010 at 04:30 (UTC)
  • aurélien levy: last responded on 21, April 2010 at 07:29 (UTC)
  • Joshue O'Connor: last responded on 21, April 2010 at 07:30 (UTC)
  • Cynthia Shelly: last responded on 21, April 2010 at 17:00 (UTC)
  • Gregory Rosmaita: last responded on 21, April 2010 at 17:24 (UTC)
  • Sean Hayes: last responded on 21, April 2010 at 18:01 (UTC)
  • Kelly Ford: last responded on 21, April 2010 at 18:43 (UTC)
  • John Foliot: last responded on 21, April 2010 at 20:51 (UTC)
  • Jim Allan: last responded on 22, April 2010 at 13:54 (UTC)
  • Debi Orton: last responded on 22, April 2010 at 14:32 (UTC)
  • Marco Ranon: last responded on 22, April 2010 at 14:34 (UTC)
  • Ben Caldwell: last responded on 22, April 2010 at 14:49 (UTC)
  • Martin Kliehm: last responded on 22, April 2010 at 15:09 (UTC)
  • Wendy Chisholm: last responded on 22, April 2010 at 15:10 (UTC)
  • Eric Carlson: last responded on 22, April 2010 at 15:11 (UTC)
  • Denis Boudreau: last responded on 22, April 2010 at 15:13 (UTC)
  • Ian Hickson: last responded on 22, April 2010 at 19:08 (UTC)
  • David Singer: last responded on 22, April 2010 at 20:19 (UTC)

Everybody has responded to this questionnaire.

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