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Re: Alt text (was VIKI - text transcodeing)

for

From: Jared Smith
Date: Jan 22, 2007 2:50PM

On 1/22/07, Alastair Campbell < <EMAIL REMOVED> > wrote:
> With regards to the square brackets, surely this is something that should be left up to the user agent?

I'm really struggling with the idea of the square brackets also. This
is certainly a user agent issue, not the developer's problem. And it
certainly seems to go against the specs. Alt text is an alternative,
not an alternative with additional markers to make it sound or look better in
user agents that don't know how to provide a differentiation between text and
alt text.

> Still, I do find screen reader's habit of reading images as part of the document flow rather unintuitive (i.e. without pause unless you use punctuation).

Inline images should be read this way, but MOST images should not.
I've always been somewhat bothered that most screen readers do not
identify images. I think this likely stems from most pages not having
alt text at all. Surely images with alt text should be identified as
an image with either the word "image" or a beep or a different
voice... or something. It certainly should not be the developers
burden to identify images or to fix reading issues in user agents.

Jared Smith
WebAIM.org