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Re: Race, Gender, and Other Categories in Alt Text for Headshots

for

From: Chaals McCathie Nevile
Date: Feb 22, 2016 7:32AM

On Fri, 19 Feb 2016 17:11:57 +0100, Shawn Henry < <EMAIL REMOVED> > wrote:

> On 2/13/2016 10:33 AM, Guy Hickling wrote:
>> Perhaps what we need is an agreed standard on what information to
>> include for mugshots and full length portraits, and what more personal
>> and possibly contentious information to omit?

I don't think so. First, what you might think is appropriate and what
someone across the world from you thinks, might be close to
irreconcilable. Even assuming you use the photos for the same purpose.

Which is unlikely. There is a lot of fine judgement about context, and
what is relevant. Stock photography looks different in different places,
just as the people do, so what matters is very unlikely to be the same
even for a supposedly standard photo.

Otherwise we would have just been using computer-generated alt for years…

As others have pointed out, there is a limited amount of information that
people want to *have* to consume every time, but it is useful to have a
mechanism for *choosing* to learn more - the goal of things like HTML's
longdesc or the SVG desc element.

> Anyone in W3C reading this?

Lots of people who read this list are involved in W3C.

cheers

--
Charles McCathie Nevile - web standards - CTO Office, Yandex
<EMAIL REMOVED> - - - Find more at http://yandex.com