[Webkit-unassigned] [Bug 5566] ALT attribute value not displayed when image is missing

[bugzilla-daemon at webkit.org]

https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=5566





--- Comment #36 from Gérard Talbot <browserbugs at gtalbot.org>  2010-11-16 11:05:17 PST ---
(In reply to comment #34)

> - there are multiple claims in this bug that it affects blind people, and fixing it is required by certain accessibility related standards. It would be great if people who posted that information could comment on how this bug affects accessibility.

The National Federation of the Blind sued Target Corp. for the inaccessibility of its Web site.
http://www.webstandards.org/2007/10/05/will-target-get-schooled/

> - what is desirable is of course a personal preference. 

The web is a world of iconography, logography, ideography and pictography. An icon can be quite small (say, an image of 16px by 16px) while its textual alternative may be relatively longer. This is most likely what happened to Tab Atkins as he explained his print icon story in comment #17. 


>I know that I generally don't want any content that's normally invisible to suddenly become visible when images get lost (for example, in Internet Archive). I also want broken images to be clearly identifiable. Those pages in Internet Archive are already a mess, adding tons of text snippets from ALT attributes would just make them even less readable.

Alexey, try this: visit this page
http://www.gtalbot.org/Varia/BrowserStats.html
with image download disabled in a few browsers (in particular with Safari or Chrome) and then assess the usefulness of the page if/when image download is disabled and alt text is not rendered inline (made to ignore image placeholder dimensions instead of truncating these).

> I see this as a choice between behavior that's good for users and behavior that matches other browsers, but the choice doesn't affect Web compatibility in any material way.

"The reader of the page frankly couldn't care less if the author has made a mistake and the page is not completely available. The reader wants the information. So if an image is not available, the page should adapt. This is what alt text is designed to do." Ian "Hixie" Hickson

regards, Gérard

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