WebAIM - Web Accessibility In Mind

E-mail List Archives

Re: Figures and Captions and Alt-text oh my...

for

From: Steve Green
Date: May 7, 2018 3:40AM


Professional-grade screen readers have always used heuristics to clean up bad design - it's one of the key things that sets them apart from more basic screen readers. The user experience would be far worse if they did nothing more than present the information that has been coded.

Steve Green
Managing Director
Test Partners Ltd


-----Original Message-----
From: WebAIM-Forum < <EMAIL REMOVED> > On Behalf Of glen walker
Sent: 07 May 2018 00:18
To: WebAIM Discussion List < <EMAIL REMOVED> >
Subject: Re: [WebAIM] Figures and Captions and Alt-text oh my...

Screen readers should not have to clean up bad design.

But that sounds kind of harsh. I would give them the benefit of the doubt and say they were trying to do the right thing but overdid it. In any event, a screen reader should not have to fix it. It should stick with what it does best and present the information that has been coded.

Glen

On Sun, May 6, 2018 at 1:39 PM, Jonathan Cohn < <EMAIL REMOVED> > wrote:

> Hello,
>
> I was just reading through the story about Alice's Restaurant that was
> in The Boston Globe this week. While an interesting story, it was
> getting very frustrating by the end with VoiceOver on the Macintosh
> reading essentially the same description for each picture four times.
>
> It would read once for the start of the figure once for the end of the
> figure, then the alt text and the text below the picture were also read.
> except for the alt attribute on the graphic itself all the text was
> exactly the same. So, our wonderful HTML5 standards have caused in at
> least one screen reader for graphical descriptions to be read four times.
>
> OK, I can figure out how to develop a figure that would not be as
> verbose though this In fact, if one puts the Macintosh in "Group" web
> navigation it won't be overly redundant.
>
> But is this issue essentially a Browser / screen reader issue or a
> design issue. I.E. if figure name = caption name = alt-text should we
> be requiring our Screen Reader vendors to clean this up, or should the
> underlying HTML generaed by Newspapers only include alternative text
> if they are not using figure /figcaption?
>
> Best wishes,
>
> Jonathan Cohn
>
>
>
> > > archives at http://webaim.org/discussion/archives
> >