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Re: Alternate text for images having caption adjacent

for

From: Jonathan Avila
Date: May 27, 2014 1:09PM

[Jared wrote] If WCAG considers a "click here" link to be considered
programmatically associated to the element that contains it, then
certainly text immediately adjacent to an image could be considered
programmatically associated to that image, no?

I agree. Another point that is related is the difference between captions
and alternative text. Alt text may often be different from a caption.
Alt text should provide a replacement for the image while a caption is
generally used to indicate how the image is related to the content. For
example, a caption might be "Washington crossing the Delaware", but the
alt text for the picture would in most situations need to describe more
than that to be a replacement of the image for someone who could not see
it.

Jonathan

-----Original Message-----
From: <EMAIL REMOVED>
[mailto: <EMAIL REMOVED> ] On Behalf Of Jared Smith
Sent: Tuesday, May 27, 2014 2:42 PM
To: WebAIM Discussion List
Subject: Re: [WebAIM] Alternate text for images having caption adjacent

On Tue, May 27, 2014 at 12:12 PM, Jonathan Avila wrote:

> Thus, according to this definition the in page equivalent must be
> associated by a short description in the alt text of the image letting
> the user know where the alternative is located.

To clarify, this only applies if the alternative text is being conveyed in
context with the image, not if it is conveyed in the alt attribute. If
it's in the alt attribute, then it's programmatically associated to the
image.

But, I think this requirement often results in less-than-optimal
accessibility. Consider a photo of me in a web page with text immediately
below it of "Jared Smith". Based on this definition, one would have to
either provide alternative text that is redundant to the actual text, or
do something like this:
<img alt="Image with description below" src="jared.jpg"> Jared Smith

This is certainly not useful or efficient. The content of the image is
that it's me, Jared Smith, so why require verbose or unnecessary text
references to that content from the image itself? Consider the overhead of
dozens of these types of alt attribute references (alt="Product image.
Product title is below."???) for every product image on a shopping web
site.

Additionally, this results in an alt attribute value that is not at all an
alternative to the image itself, but is a description of the location of
the actual alternative text. This is certainly a violation of at least the
spirit of the HTML specification's definition of the alt attribute.

If WCAG considers a "click here" link to be considered programmatically
associated to the element that contains it, then certainly text
immediately adjacent to an image could be considered programmatically
associated to that image, no?

Of course this issue can at least partially be addressed by
<figure>/<figcaption>, though I'm not aware of any AT that actually makes
this programmatic association.

Jared Smith
WebAIM.org
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