[whatwg] Alt text authoring Re: Conformance for Mail clients (and maybe other WYSIWYG editors)

[Maciej Stachowiak]

On Apr 19, 2007, at 3:47 AM, Charles McCathieNevile wrote:

> On Thu, 19 Apr 2007 01:29:39 +0200, Benjamin Hawkes-Lewis  
> <bhawkeslewis at googlemail.com> wrote:
>
>> When I make HTML mail for (solicited) wide distribution, I make  
>> sure to
>> include alt text. It's becomes especially important when clients are
>> configured to automatically convert HTML mail to text (as indeed  
>> my own
>> Thunderbird currently is). So it's not obvious to me that email
>> composing programs don't need to make it easy to add alt text.
> ...
>> Maciej Stachowiak wrote:
> ...
>>> I do think that for blogs or wikis where you are publishing to  
>>> the web
>>> audience at large, the editing tools should make it possible and  
>>> ideally
>>> even easy to add alt text. Probably not a mail client though.
>
> For the various reasons discussed in this thread, I cannot think of  
> a real justification for making a mail client that breaks one of  
> the basic accessibility features that people understand better than  
> most others. And I can think of plenty of reasons for not doing so.

I can only imagine it being useful as an advanced feature for  
experts. Normal people won't understand why a mail program would  
prompt them to type in some text about an image, that will then not  
be visible to them or their recipient.

Regards,
Maciej