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Re: Question about image in the alt attribute

for

From: Whitney Quesenbery
Date: Aug 1, 2014 9:39AM

I've argued for plain language in regulations and guidelines for years. We
even asked Ginny Redish to do a webinar on plain language and laws for the
508 Refresh Committee. (It's probably still archived somewhere, but if
you're interested, either check out her book Letting Go of the Words -
www.redish.net, or plainlanguage.gov.)

It's not enough for a group of people in a room to decide what something
means. To make standards and regulations easy to follow, they must be
written in clear language.

I urge everyone working on any sort of committee to not only have a subject
matter expert as editor, but also someone skilled in plain language
(preferably someone who is not a "combatant.")

Whitney


On Thu, Jul 31, 2014 at 9:36 PM, Chagnon | PubCom < <EMAIL REMOVED> >
wrote:

> Olaf wrote:
> "This is one of the areas where WCAG needs fixing - accessibility is not
> about disabilities of user agents. "
>
> Correct. It's about people and people will use whatever technology they can
> to meet their needs.
>
> One of the biggest problems with WCAG is how it's written and organized on
> the website. It needs a good team of professional technical writers and
> editors to rewrite the gobbily-gook that's there now, and a team of
> professional designers create a comprehendible website.
>
> Example: "Decoration, Formatting, Invisible: If non-text content is pure
> decoration, is used only for visual formatting, or is not presented to
> users, then it is implemented in a way that it can be ignored by assistive
> technology." From WCAG guidelines at
> http://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG20/#text-equiv
>
> Just in yesterday's class, my clients (federal designers, web developers,
> and editors) reviewed this guideline and came away more confused than when
> they started. Here are some of their comments.
>
> "Pure decoration." Too ambiguous a term. Undefined. Nearly everything that
> isn't text could end up classified as "pure decoration."
>
> "Used only for visual formatting." No one could figure out what the WCAG
> authors meant by this. It's hard to imagine how graphics could be used for
> visual formatting. It's equally hard to know what is meant by visual
> formatting because even text is visually formatted. That's how publications
> & websites are put together! The only ideas the class could come up with
> are rules (or outlines, borders) and background tints that are often placed
> around sidebars and other types of "boxed" information to separate them
> visually from the rest of the page.
>
> "Or is not presented to users." This phrase was the most confusing. Which
> users are they talking about? Sighted, low-vision, or blind users? And how
> could a graphic (or non-text element) that's on a webpage or in a document
> not be presented? If it's in the document, how could it not be there? (That
> comment was by an editor.) What do they mean by this term?
>
> If we want to educate people about accessibility and mandate that it be
> done, then we have to give people reasonable tools, directions, standards,
> guidelines, etc. so that it the tasks and objectives are understandable and
> doable. What we have now on the W3C website is an incomprehensible,
> disorganized, confusing mess.
>
> There is one good, readable section on the site: the POUR section
> http://www.w3.org/WAI/WCAG20/glance/. Kudos to the authors for adding
> this
> big-picture concept to WCAG. I use it all the time in my classes when
> teaching accessible documents to federal employees. It gets the message
> across succinctly. We need more of this.
>
> -Bevi Chagnon
> - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
> - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
> www.PubCom.com - Trainers, Consultants, Designers, Developers.
> Print, Web, Acrobat, XML, eBooks, and U.S. Federal Section 508
> Accessibility.
> Taka a Sec. 508 Class in 2014 - www.Pubcom.com/classes
>
>
> > > >