[whatwg] Alt text authoring Re: Conformance for Mail clients
Matthew Paul Thomas
mpt at myrealbox.com
Thu Apr 19 05:35:31 PDT 2007
On Apr 19, 2007, at 10:47 PM, Charles McCathieNevile wrote:
> ...
> 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.
> ...
As Benjamin said, it's worthwhile entering alt= text when sending to
many recipients, and/or to unknown recipients; that is why alt= is
important for public Web pages (where you don't know who is going to
read a page) and for Intranets (where if a blind person joins the
company tomorrow, they shouldn't be impeded by lack of alt= text on
existing pages).
But it seems likely that the vast majority of non-spam e-mail messages
are sent to individuals who are known by the sender to be
fully-sighted. In that case putting up an interface for entering alt=
text, *just in case* the recipient gets struck blind before they get
around to reading the message, seems a bit unreasonable.
It would also be weird for a mail client to ask for alternate text for
images in HTML messages (because HTML requires it), but not for images
in multipart/mixed plain-text messages (because there's nowhere to put
it).
--
Matthew Paul Thomas
http://mpt.net.nz/
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