[uf-new] figure microformat

[Benjamin Hawkes-Lewis]

Toby A Inkster wrote:
> Sent this a couple of days ago, but was rejected from the list because 
> of a problem with my subscription. Here we go again...
> 
> I spent a couple of hours today summarising some of the suggestions 
> people have made on the figure-examples page and condensing it down into 
> a draft microformat:
> 
> http://microformats.org/wiki/figure
> 
> What do people think? Is it ready to go onto the drafts list or do you 
> think it needs a little extra work?

I suspect ALT="", as featured in your Einstein example, is suboptimal 
for content images that people might want to find, bookmark, save, or 
otherwise manipulate. The general behavior of text browsers and screen 
readers is to ignore images with ALT="".

On the whole, ALT="" is best reserved for genuinely decorative images 
when you want to indicate that search engines, text browsers, voice 
browsers, and screen readers should completely ignore an image. For example:

<button><img alt="" src="play-icon.gif">Play video</button>

For a captioned photo I'd recommend either using a concise label 
(alt="Einstein") or a brief description of what you can see, depending 
on your editorial focus and what information is provided by text elsewhere.

ALT="Einstein photographed at 68, eyebrow arched as he looks out to the 
camera, face creased with wrinkles, with an impressive mustache and a 
scraggy mane of white hair."

would be one attempt to provide an actual text equivalent for (say):

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Albert_Einstein_Head.jpg

If you'd like to provide a lengthy description but feel it would clog up 
non-visual renderings, put it in another document and reference it via 
LONGDESC. Where a caption describes a content image, there's a good case 
for making it the target of the LONGDESC attribute via its fragment 
identifier.

The general principle is to label the content image and provide the same 
critical information to all users, minimizing information in ALT in so 
far as the same information is provided by text elsewhere in the document.

Whatever you think of the necessity of alternative text for content 
images, such supplementary uses of ALT and LONGDESC need (it seems to 
me) to have some sort of place in the proposed draft.

Compare (and contrast):

http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/struct/objects.html#h-13.2

http://www.w3.org/QA/Tips/altAttribute

http://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG20/#text-equiv

http://www.bbc.co.uk/guidelines/newmedia/accessibility/text_equivs.shtml

http://joeclark.org/book/sashay/serialization/Chapter06.html

http://www.isolani.co.uk/blog/access/FallacyOfTooMuchAccessibility

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2007/12/using-alt-attributes-smartly.html

http://blog.whatwg.org/omit-alt

http://blog.whatwg.org/the-longdesc-lottery

http://www.rnib.org.uk/wacblog/articles/too-much-accessibility/too-much-accessibility-the-rise-and-fall-of-the-longdesc/

--
Benjamin Hawkes-Lewis