[whatwg] Alt text authoring Re: Conformance for Mail clients

[Charles McCathieNevile]

On Thu, 19 Apr 2007 15:43:14 +0200, Thomas Broyer <t.broyer at gmail.com> wrote:

> 2007/4/19, Matthew Paul Thomas:

> Thunderbird allows you to set 'alt' ...
> When you drag/drop an image into a message, the default is alt="".

Setting a default of alt="" is bad behaviour, since the program has no way of knowing what an appropriate alt might be (the behaviour described with user interaction is ideal), and makes an arbitrary decision that makes it more or less impossible to flag the problem and repair it later.

The application should simply leave out the alt attribute. This makes it trivially easy to build a repair application where one is required or desired, and has no practical drawback if the error is left in (given the state of HTML email standardisation...).

This should be lear from the W3C's authoring tool accessibility guidelines - http://www.w3.org/TR/ATAG which were desgined with a variety of tools in mind including CMS and email.

cheers

Chaals

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  Charles McCathieNevile, Opera Software: Standards Group
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