6494 2009-01-29 15:04:19 +0000 Make the requiredness about alt more obvious 2010-10-04 13:59:29 +0000 1 1 1 Unclassified HTML WG pre-LC1 HTML5 spec (editor: Ian Hickson) unspecified All All CLOSED FIXED a11y, a11ytf, a11y_text-alt P2 normal --- 1 zcorpan ian laura.lee.carlson mike olivier.gendrin public-html-a11y public-html-admin public-html-wg-issue-tracking public-html-bugzilla oldest_to_newest 23320 0 zcorpan 2009-01-29 15:04:19 +0000 HTML5 allows <img> elements to be associated with a "caption" by various means, in which case the alt attribute may be omitted, and AFAICT there's only one case when the alt attribute may be omitted even without a caption, which is: "4.8.2.1.11 An image in an e-mail or document intended for a specific person who is known to be able to view images" ...which is probably not something that you would see on the Web and so a validator could ignore that case, making alt required (when there's no caption), meaning that a validator would flag an error when there's no alt and no caption. From discussions on w3c-wai-pf it appears that it is not obvious from the spec that this is the case so it would perhaps be useful if the spec was clearer on this point. 24473 1 ian 2009-04-01 01:48:45 +0000 I added a section for conformance checkers... not sure how else to do it. 31434 2 laura.lee.carlson 2010-02-03 18:18:52 +0000 Please refer to the Change Proposal "Replace img guidance for conformance checkers with suggested text" [1] for details on how to modify the HTML5 Specification so that automatic validators can programmatically detect the presence or absence of text alternatives on the img element. Thank you. [1] http://esw.w3.org/topic/HTML/ChangeProposals/ImgElement20090126 This is associated with HTML TRACKER ISSUE-31 http://www.w3.org/html/wg/tracker/issues/31 The full issue and is detailed at: Omitting Short Text Alternatives on <img> http://esw.w3.org/topic/HTML/IssueAltAttribute 31758 3 cooper 2010-02-11 17:17:52 +0000 The HTML Accessibility Task Force intends to track these issues, per the proposal at http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-html-a11y/2010Jan/0245.html.