Re: Change proposals for ISSUE-31 and ISSUE-80

hi aryeh,

here is a small study i did a while back (2007), which may be of interest
Investigating the proposed alt attribute recommendations in HTML 5
http://www.paciellogroup.com/resources/articles/altinhtml5.html

regards
stevef
On 20 July 2010 00:01, Aryeh Gregor
<Simetrical+w3c@gmail.com<Simetrical%2Bw3c@gmail.com>
> wrote:

> On Mon, Jul 19, 2010 at 5:15 AM, Jonas Sicking <jonas@sicking.cc> wrote:
> > I have two additional goals with these removals. First of all I think
> > @alt is the most (or even only) successful bolt-on accessibility
> > attribute in the history of HTML. And like old proverb goes: if it
> > ain't broken, don't fix it. I.e. given the success of @alt, I think we
> > should be extremely careful about messing around with it. For this
> > reason I'd like to make the number of changes to @alt as small as
> > possible.
>
> In what sense is alt so successful?  It's true that a lot of websites
> specify alt text, but in my experience, it's rarely any good.  In
> fact, most alt text I see is probably no better than just the
> filename, which could be added automatically by the screen reader.  It
> seems to me that authors who use alt text overwhelmingly do so just to
> shut up validators, and I can't see how this helps anyone.  It's a
> clear case of hidden metadata.
>
> What data is there that directly demonstrates that alt text as
> actually used on typical websites is helpful to blind people in
> practice?  If you took a typical web page and removed all the alt
> text, and maybe reconfigured the UA if its defaults for missing alt
> text weren't great, would it be much less usable in a screen reader?
>
>


-- 
with regards

Steve Faulkner
Technical Director - TPG Europe
Director - Web Accessibility Tools Consortium

www.paciellogroup.com | www.wat-c.org
Web Accessibility Toolbar -
http://www.paciellogroup.com/resources/wat-ie-about.html