Edit comment LC-1715 for Mobile Web Best Practices Working Group

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Comment LC-1715

Comment Shortname:

Commenter: Henri Sivonen <hsivonen@iki.fi>

Message-id:

Section of the document concerned:

[Free text description]Document as a wholeW3C mobileOK Basic Tests 1.0 /**/ code { font-... W3C mobileOK Basic Tests 1.0 W3C Working Draft 25 May 2007 Abstract Status of this Document Table of Contents Appendices 1 Introduction 1.1 Levels of mobileOK 1.1.1 mobileOK Basic 1.1.2 mobileOK Pro 1.1.3 Out of Scope 1.1.4 Beyond mobileOK 1.2 Applicability 1.3 Claiming mobileOK conformance 2 Conformance 2.1 Validity of the Tests 2.2 Testing Outcomes 2.3 Conduct of Tests 2.3.1 Order of Tests 2.3.2 HTTP Request 2.3.3 HTTP Response 2.3.4 Meta http-equiv Elements 2.3.5 CSS Style 2.3.6 Included Resources 2.3.7 Included Style Sheet Resources 2.3.8 Visible Linked Resources 2.3.9 Validity 2.3.10 White Space 3 mobileOK Basic Tests 3.1 AUTO_REFRESH (partial) and REDIRECTION 3.2 CACHING 3.3 CHARACTER_ENCODING_SUPPORT and CHARACTER_ENCODING_USE 3.4 CONTENT_FORMAT_SUPPORT and VALID_MARKUP 3.5 DEFAULT_INPUT_MODE 3.6 EXTERNAL_RESOURCES 3.7 GRAPHICS_FOR_SPACING 3.8 IMAGE_MAPS 3.9 IMAGES_RESIZING and IMAGES_SPECIFY_SIZE 3.10 LINK_TARGET_FORMAT 3.11 MEASURES 3.12 MINIMIZE 3.13 NO_FRAMES 3.14 NON-TEXT_ALTERNATIVES (partial) 3.15 OBJECTS_OR_SCRIPT (partial) 3.16 PAGE_SIZE_LIMIT 3.17 PAGE_TITLE (partial) 3.18 POP_UPS 3.19 PROVIDE_DEFAULTS (partial) 3.20 STYLE_SHEETS_SUPPORT (partial) 3.21 STYLE_SHEETS_USE 3.22 TABLES_ALTERNATIVES 3.23 TABLES_LAYOUT (partial) 3.24 TABLES_NESTED A Acknowledgements(Non-Normative) B References(Non-Normative) BestPractices CSS GIF JPEG POWDER RFC2617 Techniques UTF-8 utf8_perl WCAG XHTMLBasic11 XHTMLModularization XML10 XML11 C Relationship between Best Practices and mobileOK Tests(Non-Normative)
or

Refinement of the section concerned:

Status:

open proposal pending resolved_yes resolved_no resolved_partial other assigned to Nobody

Type: substantive editorial typo question general comment undefined

Resolution status:

Response drafted Resolution implemented Reply sent to commenter

Response status:

No response from Commenter yet Commenter approved disposition Commenter objected to disposition
Commenter's response (URI):

Comment:

> If an alt attribute is not present or consists only of white space,
> FAIL

This is a bad idea because it encourages badge hunters to include
bogus alt text that actually harms accessibility. Tests like this
only lead to an arms race where the placeholder data always gets a
step more complicated than what the testing tools can detect as a
placeholder.

Related issues: (space separated ids)

WG Notes: The alternative is to not test for this, I suppose, and it extends into an argument against alt entirely. If you're not going to encourage people to use it, for fear of abuse, shouldn't it be removed?

Resolution: The test specifically allows empty ALT tags which is the accepted way of indicating that there is no appropriate ALT text.

(Please make sure the resolution is adapted for public consumption)