[Pmwiki-users] Re: encouraging alt text was Re: markup musings, with missing #7 restored

Crisses crisses
Sun May 23 11:11:51 CDT 2004


On May 23, 2004, at 9:05 AM, Christian Ridderstr?m wrote:

> On Sun, 23 May 2004, Crisses wrote:
>
>> it might *BE* rare -- but it shouldn't be.  I think it's of great
>> importance to make alt text for images -- whether attached or not --
>> easy to include in the wikis.  That's an accessibility issue.  I think
>> that adding alt text to images should be so easy it's encouraged.
>
> We might even consider an option (controlled by the admin) where the 
> user
> must add an alt-text -- AFAIK, they're required by the standard.
>
>> As for how to do it so it's fast and intuitive:
>> Quotes are disallowed in URIs?  If they are, can it be:
>> Attach:w3c.jpg"This is my dog Spot."
>
> I think a drawback with quotes is that it's less clear that it's an
> alternate text. Maybe adding a '|' between would make it better, eg
>
> 	 Attach:w3c.jpg | "This is my dog Spot."

What happens with tables then?

At the point of Attach:w3c.jpg | "This is my dog Spot." I think it 
becomes becomes harder to search on consistenly.  yeah, the combination 
of (in perl-compatible-regex terms)  '/.[tla]\s\"/' might be rare but 
'/.[tla]\"/' would be rarer, I think, and the attachment in this case 
is literal to the user.  The quotes make it obvious that it's a 
quote...which is where the intuitiveness comes in.  documentation would 
say:

This is how you attach images.  First tell the wiki you want a picture 
attached to the document by saying "Attach:" then, without spaces, you 
put the name of the image file.  It's a great idea to put a quote 
description of the image as well, as in "the image description".  
Example (note the lack of spaces between elements):

	Attach:joesdog.jpg"This is a picture of my dog Spot."

The lack of spaces links all of these elements together for the wiki.  
This will first ask someone to upload the file if it is not uploaded 
already, and once the file is already uploaded, it will display the 
image of Joe's dog.  For someone who is using a voice interpreter of 
the website, using a text-only venue, or who leaves images in their 
browser turned off, they will see or hear "This is a picture of my dog 
Spot." where the image would have been.  This is called "alternate 
text" and can be very important to make a webpage accessible to 
everyone.


end of lecture. :)

> Another alternative is a separate directive for inserting an image, 
> e.g.
>
> 	[[figure w3c.jpg This is my dog Spot.]]

This still would work with [[figure joesdog.jpg"This is a picture of my 
dog Spot."]] and would not be confused with [[url | link text]] or the 
current [[free link]] ideas.

>> making the above [[W3C | Attach:w3c.jpg"World Wide Web Consortium"]]
>
> Using a separate directive that would like like this:
>
> 	[[W3C | [[figure w3c.jpg World Wide Web Consortium]] ]]

And is more characters to type...and I think less like living language 
-- less like writing prose -- which is more what this is supposed to 
be; a (attempt towards) natural extension of prose writing.

Crisses



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