Wikipedia talk:Alternate text for images

Older discussion moved to Wikipedia talk:Alternate text for images/archive 1

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I've used a somewhat different approach to displaying the examples in this article. The "What it looks like" and similar sections are set off in in a box with a white background. I find it much easier to look at than the table examples used on many of our example pages. Think it could be used in other places too? Granted, it makes the article quite a bit longer, but it's less prone to uglification with smaller screen sizes. I'm interested to know what you guys think of this. -- Wapcaplet 14:48 13 Jun 2003 (UTC)

Hmm, that sure takes a lot of space. :-/

I'm more concerned, however, with the inclusion of the "What people see with images turned off" mockup (sorry I neglected to explain why I deleted it earlier). That disjointed rendering of alt text by visual browsers (putting it in a box) is perhaps the single greatest reason why authors write accessibility-unfriendly alternate text in the first place. For that reason, the rendering you've imitated is (as I said earlier) regarded by the Mozilla developers as a bug in Mozilla; they plan to display alt much the same way Lynx does, to encourage people to write alternate text properly.

-- Mpt

That may be, but the simple fact is that current browsers often do render alt text in this way. The current stable version of Mozilla (1.3.1) for Linux does not render the text in-line, and in fact, for the Chess example, simply displays an empty space in place of the image. MSIE 4.0 and MSIE 5.0 for Windows both display a box with the alt text within it, much like the mockup does. (I'm not sure if newer versions do this.) Many versions of Opera do the same. I think it's important to include an example of what many people will see when they browse with images turned off. We could easily include a caveat that states that this isn't necessarily appropriate behavior; it does, nevertheless, occur.

IMO if you reinforce the "alt goes in a box" thinking by showing it in this article, that will undo any positive accessibility effect this article might have had. It's much less important to me that alternate text looks ok for people who have a choice about displaying images anyway, than that it works well for people who will never have such a choice. -- Mpt

We can choose alt text that works for both the IE user with images turned off, AND the Lynx user. This isn't an either/or decision. Martin

My point exactly; that's why I feel it's necessary to show an example of what it might look like in MSIE with images off. -- Wapcaplet 17:43 13 Jun 2003 (UTC)

We can put a caveat next to it then. I think it's important enough to show it, since it is clearly of importance to those who browse without images and happen to use MSIE 4.0 or 5.0 for Windows, any version of Opera (including the newest), or any number of other browsers which exhibit this behavior. Those who browse without images may not have too much choice in the matter. When I used a dial-up connection, I almost always browsed with images off; many pages take literally several minutes to load on a dialup, due to the abundance of images. Users may also be restricted by bandwidth quotas, or may be paying by the minute for their internet usage. Why ignore those people? -- Wapcaplet 17:15 13 Jun 2003 (UTC)

Regarding the space that these take up: perhaps the examples could be floated, with comments to the side? The issue there would be that they are likely to all end up being different widths, which could look bad. I'll try it and see what it looks like... -- Wapcaplet 16:36 13 Jun 2003 (UTC)

P.S. - Also, I would tend to disagree with the "DIVs are the tofu of HTML" assessment. In my web design work, I've found DIV to be extraordinarily useful in giving a document structure and semantic organization. Yes, ideally, images should format themselves according to CSS class characteristics, but we don't always want images to float to the right, necessarily. DIV is great for things like placing a navigation bar, setting examples off from other text, making footnotes or sidenotes, etc. Can you recommend an alternative method of doing such structural organization without using DIVs? -- Wapcaplet 14:56 13 Jun 2003 (UTC)

And tofu is extraordinarily useful as well. :-) Your navigation bar should probably be a ul (which can be styled to run horizontally, if you want). Your examples in Wikipedia:Alternate text for images are quoting what an article might say, so use blockquote. For your "etc" I'd have to see your source code.

That some images shouldn't float to the right is why I proposed [[Illustration:...]] for those that do. Mpt

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Martin, please stop it. You're writing that alternate text is rendered as a replacement for the image in Wikipedia search, view source, and Google Images.That simply isn't true. Wikipedia search and view source both show source code; they do not replace the [[Image:...]] code with the alternate text. And while Google Images does index using alt, it does not replace images with their alternate text; if it did, nobody would use it. -- Mpt 18:08 13 Jun 2003 (UTC)

Looks like a simple misunderstanding over what is meant by "replacement." I think Martin is going for any case when the image is not actually visible, which would include source code, google, etc. -- Wapcaplet 18:19 13 Jun 2003 (UTC)

Ahh - I see your point. I've edited appropriately. Martin

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100 examples of images being used in Wikipedia, and good alternate text for them. -- Mpt 02:03 15 Jun 2003 (UTC)

I think the reason the word "usually" has been changed to "often" is because we have not yet reached an agreement about what the appropriate recommendation is. I still think it's important not to alienate the sighted users who are browsing without images, and flatly recommending an empty alt string for most images effectively ignores this group of people. So far the best argument you have given for the usage of an empty alt string is to avoid repeating information that is already in the text of the article. Having good alt text seems to me more important than avoiding repetition. Other than the avoidance of repetition, what is so great about empty alt text to make it worth ignoring a potentially significant segment of viewers? -- Wapcaplet 14:06 15 Jun 2003 (UTC)

Another good reason to use non-empty alt text is the fact that all images in Wikipedia articles are links (namely, to the image description page). Using an empty string (or even an empty space) for a hypertext link is not recommended by any web authority I know of.

Specifically, from Flavell's article:

Also, accessibility checkers rightly complain when they find an image used alone as a link and given ALT="", and some browsers will detect this situation and overrule the ALT="" in the interests of accessibility.

-- Wapcaplet 21:35 15 Jun 2003 (UTC)

I think that this is a rather important point. In response to a question to me from Mpt that has now floated into archives, let me explain the perspective that I come at this from: a Wikipedia editor that sometimes browses Wikipedia with a text browser. I want Wikipedia to be useful to blind users, but I also want Wikipedia to be useful to me. And an empty ALT tag is worse than useless when an editor browses with a text browser, because then we don't know what's going on in the page. I've never seen any reason yet why "Photo of Karl Marx." is harmful for any user. Worse than other possibilities, such as a description of how he looks -- yes. Useless for certain users, such as blind readers -- yes. But AFAICT, it's useful for me and harmless for others, until a future editor writes something better. -- Toby Bartels 17:05 1 Jul 2003 (UTC)

Agreed. It's good not to alienate users of speech browsers, but it's also pretty important not to alienate the other 99% of users, or at the very least, the percentage that use text-only or images-off browsers. Besides, there are many more issues with accessibility that would cause far greater problems for several groups of users; the problem of choosing good link text, using tables appropriately, color choices, and so on are under discussion (rather one-sided at the moment) at m:Wikipedia accessibility. -- Wapcaplet 17:28 1 Jul 2003 (UTC)

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I've been looking for external references that agree with Mpt's POV, and I've managed to find one: [1] (http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/html/alt#content) says "Redundant images call for empty alt". That is along the lines of Mpt's approach. Author: Jukka "Yucca" Korpela. It's an interesting page, and while it agrees with Mpt on this point it disagrees on others. Martin

I see some interesting Rules of thumb (http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/html/alt#thumb) on that page, that somewhat agree with me but also (when looked at more closely) hint at ways to satisfy both me and Mbt. #8 notes the usefulness of

alt="[Graphic presentation of the ventilation system]"

as an interim solution. This fits in with my opinion about such things as "Photgraph of Karl Marx.". It's better if you have text that truly replaces the image, but in the meantime, I want to know what's going on. The section on Making text and image really alternative (http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/html/alt#parallel) has some yet more sophisticated ideas that we should consdier. Also, #12 would support that the ensure having some text to serve as an anchor for a link. But again, there are even better ideas in the section on Using an image and a text in parallel as a link (http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/html/alt#parlink). -- Toby Bartels 18:45 1 Jul 2003 (UTC)

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I'm going to remove the table containing the lettuce example, and convert it to DIVs also. The DIVs take up considerably more space, but here is what that table looks like in Lynx:

 Don't do this Do this instead
   Wikipedia code [[Image:Lettuce.jpg|Photo of some lettuce]]
   A lettuce plant has a short stem initially, but when it blooms, the stem
   lengthens  and branches. [[Image:Lettuce.jpg|Most lettuce varieties have
   a round mass of broad green leaves, with wrinkled edges.]]
   A lettuce plant has a short stem initially, but when it blooms, the stem
   lengthens and branches.
   What people hear "Photo of some lettuce A lettuce plant has a short stem
   initially,  but  when it blooms, the stem lengthens and branches." "Most
   lettuce varieties have a round mass of broad green leaves, with wrinkled
   edges. A lettuce plant has a short stem initially, but when it blooms."

Clearly not an accessible solution :-) Perhaps something similar should also be done for our other policy pages which make use of tables. -- Wapcaplet 15:37 17 Jun 2003 (UTC)