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http://www.w3.org/mid/B6CB855C5769484F862F4FB2CCFA50F402D545A7@VHAISHMSGJ2.vha.med.va.gov Guidance for conformance checkers Allowing a conformance checker to allow images without alt attributes as long as they have a title attribute are asking for trouble. Already, people assume that title and alt can serve the same purpose, and although the spec explains the limited situations in which a title attribute is acceptable, your average web-developer is not going to read the specification. We have not gotten web devs to reliably implement alt attributes yet, allowing conformance checkers to pass an alt-free img because it has a title attribute, or because the image has been generated with certain tools, will only maintain the level of "but the checker said it was fine" that we already have. Images without alt attributes should always be flagged. If exceptions need to be made for the cases listed in the situations cited, those exceptions should be made knowingly by a human being somewhere (webmaster, site maintainer, etc.). Also, with the advancing level of image recognition, there may eventually be automatic ways of generating rudimentary alternative text which could also count as rudimentary keyword generation for categorizing online images. Explicitly excusing a condition based on current inconvenience and limitations seems short-sighted. It would also be useful to have a way to view alternative text even if images are not turned off, for users who would benefit from this feature. PS. The suggested alternative text for the image taken by the blind photographer would seem to be inaccurate. Hummingbird feeders do not contain nuts and seeds, they contain sugar water, so whomever described the picture as a hummingbird feeder has mislead the alt-text reader. [split out from bug 13590]
Bug triage sub-team thinks this is related to existing text alternatives work, so thinks is an HTML A11Y TF priority. Adding dependency to 8171 so when that master bug is addressed, this one can be addressed.
Henri, what do you intend to implement in your validator?
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: Need implementation feedback. In the absence of such feedback, the existing spec seems fine.
This bug has been overtaken and is no longer valid. The HTML Accessibility TF resolved to close this bug on 30 Jan 2013: http://www.w3.org/2014/01/30-html-a11y-minutes.html#item09