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

[Charles McCathieNevile]

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.

cheers

Chaals

-- 
  Charles McCathieNevile, Opera Software: Standards Group
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