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Bug 13833 - Suggesting new feature: Accessible Image tag for Visually Impaired Hi, I design tactile graphics for visually impaired individuals. The amount of useful visual information is enormous and the majority of it is not accessible to the visually impaired. In H
Summary: Suggesting new feature: Accessible Image tag for Visually Impaired Hi, I desi...
Status: RESOLVED NEEDSINFO
Alias: None
Product: HTML WG
Classification: Unclassified
Component: HTML5 spec (show other bugs)
Version: unspecified
Hardware: Other other
: P3 normal
Target Milestone: ---
Assignee: Ian 'Hixie' Hickson
QA Contact: HTML WG Bugzilla archive list
URL: http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/...
Whiteboard:
Keywords: a11y, a11y_text-alt
Depends on:
Blocks:
 
Reported: 2011-08-19 08:39 UTC by contributor
Modified: 2011-10-20 23:37 UTC (History)
6 users (show)

See Also:

Attachments

Description contributor 2011-08-19 08:39:34 UTC 
Specification: http://dev.w3.org/html5/spec/Overview.html
Multipage: http://www.whatwg.org/C#top
Complete: http://www.whatwg.org/c#top

Comment:
Suggesting new feature: Accessible Image tag for Visually Impaired


Hi,

I design tactile graphics for visually impaired individuals. The amount of
useful visual information is enormous and the majority of it is not accessible
to the visually impaired.

In Html there are two tags for alternative text which are helpful but for a
vast number of images a text description is not enough – either sight or
tactile impute is needed to access the graphic information.

Would it be possible to create a tag for alternative images so that a blind
person could download the image and emboss it out on his/her Brailler so that
he/she could enjoy the information that only a graphic can convey?

In order to make a picture/diagram accessible it often needs to be modified
– simplified otherwise the tactile information can be too cluttered and be
too difficult to decipher.

Visual and tactile information are very similar. It is the eyes and fingers
who deliver the information to the brain and the brain interprets. 

By offering such a tag I feel it would increase the understanding of
accessible information dramatically and therefore the amount
of such graphics since more illustrators and designers would learn about them
and create them. This one html tag could greatly increase education
opportunities and the quality of life for the visually impaired.

Thank you,

Lisa Yayla
Huseby Resource Center for the Visually Impaired
Oslo, Norway

Posted from: 158.36.153.34
User agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 8.0; Windows NT 6.1; Trident/4.0; SLCC2; .NET CLR 2.0.50727; .NET CLR 3.5.30729; .NET CLR 3.0.30729; Media Center PC 6.0; InfoPath.2; Tablet PC 2.0; .NET4.0C; .NET4.0E)
Comment 1 Ian 'Hixie' Hickson 2011-10-04 23:02:42 UTC 
My recommendation would be to define a custom attribute to take a URL to emboss, as in:

   <img src="design.png" alt="The bolt goes through the wood beam and is fastened on the other side by a large nut." x-huseby-emboss="design-embossed.png">

...and then have your software automatically detect the x-huseby-emboss="" attribute.

If this proves to be successful, then it would make sense to add it as part of the core language. We don't want to add it prematurely because otherwise it's likely to end up abused and polluted the way longdesc="" was.

How does that sound?
Comment 2 Ian 'Hixie' Hickson 2011-10-20 23:37:55 UTC 
EDITOR'S RESPONSE: This is an Editor's Response to your comment. If you are satisfied with this response, please change the state of this bug to CLOSED. If you have additional information and would like the editor to reconsider, please reopen this bug. If you would like to escalate the issue to the full HTML Working Group, please add the TrackerRequest keyword to this bug, and suggest title and text for the tracker issue; or you may create a tracker issue yourself, if you are able to do so. For more details, see this document:
   http://dev.w3.org/html5/decision-policy/decision-policy.html

Status: Did Not Understand Request
Change Description: no spec change
Rationale: see comment 1