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Re: Graphical heading & Alt-text

for

From: Olaf Drümmer
Date: Jul 16, 2013 3:55AM

Again, I somehow disagree - the features are there.. (but admittedly they have been implemented in a way that is the opposite of being user friendly).


- first, XMP metadata schemas can be defined by anyone in the world, and most that are widely used have been defined by organisations other than Adobe - Dublin Core comes to mind, or IPTC, or EXIF, or…; I am not aware of any such established metadata schema (XMP or otherwise) that has a field for actual text;

- there are fields in some schemas that can serve as a source Alt text, but for good reasons there is not the one and only Alt text metadata field; in the world of news article and photos from news agencies, based on IPTC, there are a few fields that are relevant here; one will contain a short text, more like a title, another field will contain an extensive, even narrative explanation of the image; then you have Dublin Core title or description; that's already four fields…

- if the accessibility community believes there should be metadata fields providing certain information right away - like 'suggested Alt text when used as an image in a document' or 'suggested ActualText when used not as an image but more like a piece of text' - this community is free to develop an XMP metadata schema for this, and promote its adoption (which usually never takes longer than five or ten years)

- BTW - XMP itself is an ISO standard (ISO 16684-1) since February 2012.

- I would't blame Adobe for the somehow chaotic situation when it comes to predefined metadata fields for something like alternate text - while Adobe has invented and published XMP as an architecture for metadata, they very wisely stayed out of how certain communities and industries put XMP to work. They often helped interested communities migrate their metadata concepts to XMP, but Adobe did't tell them which fields to use for what etc.

- in the object export options dialog you can retrieve any metadata field you want (if you can figure out how to do it right… - some more user friendly support in the user interface and some documentation would have been nice)

- one of the obstacles overall: everybody believes metadata (and actually using them) should be cool and there should be a standard for it etc. - as long as that standard is exactly what a given user thinks it should be; there is very little readiness in the market to accept something that is a standard but does not meet exactly a user's taste or preferences.

Olaf


Am 16 Jul 2013 um 07:25 schrieb Duff Johnson < <EMAIL REMOVED> >:

> Ugh! And it's even worse because XMP has so much promise as a metadata model… and yet Adobe (who invented it) hasn't bothered to implement it properly themselves in a key instance in which people might like to do so!