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

[Benjamin Hawkes-Lewis]

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.

--
Benjamin Hawkes-Lewis

Maciej Stachowiak wrote:
> 
> On Apr 18, 2007, at 11:56 AM, Charles McCathieNevile wrote:
> 
>> On Mon, 16 Apr 2007 10:32:10 -0400, Maciej Stachowiak <mjs at apple.com> 
>> wrote:
>>
>>> I think it remains the case that for end-user generated content,
>>> there will often be semantically meaningful images that are
>>> meaningful in themselves and cannot be considered alternate
>>> representations of some piece of text.
>>
>> Years of work on accessibility, and a particular focus on authoring 
>> tools, suggests that while this is certainly true, There are lots of 
>> good ways to enable authors to include an alternate. One of the big 
>> frustrations I find with the web today is using assorted tools like 
>> wikis and blogsto edit content, and not being able to put useful 
>> content for alt where appropriate, and mark it explicitly blank for 
>> other cases.
> 
> 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.
> 
> Regards,
> Maciej
> 
>