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Alt text matters to users. When an image is not visible, due either to a user’s own visual or cognitive disability, or their use of a low-bandwidth or intermittent connection to the web, @alt is there to provide the necessary, missing semantics. This is a good thing. So good, in fact, that @alt is a required attribute in HTML 4.01 and all flavors of XHTML. If you omit alt text, your code is not valid HTML.

However, as of today, alt is not a required attribute for the img element in HTML5. Despite claims that this is neutral or even beneficial to accessibility, this is a bad idea, made worse by adversarial relations between participants in the HTML Working Group and accessibility advocates, including those in the W3C/WAI Protocols and Formats Working Group, of which I am a participant.

Much of the discussion around this rather tense standoff has centered around what I call the Flickr Defense. It goes like this:

Sites like Flickr depend on user-generated content in the form of uploaded images. (Of course Flickr now accepts video, something that has also been added to HTML5, and which may have even bigger problems than the issue at hand. But that’s for another time.) Flickr doesn’t know what to communicate as meaningful alt text. But if we want them to adopt HTML5, they wouldn’t be able to create valid documents without that @alt. So in this very limited case, Flickr should be able to have an img element without @alt.

This argument is bogus on numerous counts.

First, let’s dispense with the very limited case for making @alt optional. Once an attribute like @alt is optional anywhere, it’s optional everywhere. One could make the argument that the specification limits the scope of acceptable use of missing @alt to only where it’s not possible for it to be meaningful. But that’s just one image out of 65 on the average Flickr photo page. And if it’s an optional attribute, we could strip the alt text from all of those other images, and an HTML5 validator could do nothing but assert that it remains valid. That’s a huge step backward for users as well as accessibility evaluation tools, which interpret missing alt as an error. But more on that later.

Second, Flickr could, in fact, require that meaningful alt text accompany images that are uploaded. Other sites, such as Smugmug, actually do offer the ability to do that, either as they’re uploaded, or as a batch job after the fact. The Authoring Tool Accessibility Guidelines 2.0, which apply explicitly to sites like Flickr, require that such sites prompt users for that content. If they prompted for and stored that content from the user, they’d be able to insert meaningful alt text where it is required. There’s no need to give them a pass.

(Although that’s exactly what the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0 does. Flickr could make a partial conformance claim stating exactly why they can’t produce alt text. They could still insert generic alt text like “user-uploaded image” and satisfy the requirements of users with disabilities to some extent.)

Third, Flickr image pages have over 80 validity errors, and that’s just HTML 4.01 Transitional. Why should the HTML specification make supposedly narrow exceptions to the spec to be more lax about validation when the sites themselves aren’t even trying today?

How it works today

There are three conditions for alt text that are currently determinable:

• This image has meaningful alt text. (alt=”foo”)
• This image is decorative, and needs no text equivalent. (alt=”")

The third is determinable now, but would not be in HTML5 as proposed:

• The author has not entered alt text for this image. (missing @alt)

This is critical because assistive technology looks for repair data (including filename, etc.) when @alt is missing. We need to know whether @alt is null due to conscious effort, or that it has been ignored, in order to know what to do next.

The Flickr Defense is a fourth state:

• The author asserts that s/he cannot provide alt text.

It is the wrong solution to take away the semantics from the third state to indicate the fourth. There would be far more missing @alt attribs due to inattentiveness on the part of the author than conscientious statements that @alt is not possible.

The clearest indicator that this is an awful idea is that same Flickr image page. All of the images with missing alt attributes on the Flickr image page could have meaningful data. In fact, most of them do. It’s just sitting in the title attribute instead.

So what do we do, smart guy?

I don’t want to propose a solution to the problem when I think the status quo in HTML 4.01 doesn’t need to be mucked with. But, okay, you read a big long accessibility article, so here’s a thought experiment.

Add an attribute. Call it @usergenerated. When a UA encounters this attrib, it indicates that the author has stated alt cannot be provided programmatically.

It would be even better if other users could detect that attrib and annotate the attached image. If you could get around the spam potential, this could be a real winner. Crowd-sourced @alt. That’s actual accessibility progress, measurable today.

If you can’t do that much, leave @alt alone.

Gez Lemon’s analysis of the subject got me wound up enough to write about it. If you don’t like what I had to say, blame him.

(Note: This isn’t meant as a critique of Flickr per se. It just happens to be a site that’s being held up by third parties as the reason to backtrack on @alt as a required attribute.)

You know what I think should cause everyone to give at least some thought to accessibility?

Your thirties.

I remember one day, when I was 30. I threw the sheets off the bed, and shot my legs out to launch myself from the bed. I took two steps forward, saw a blinding light… and found myself lying on the floor, unable to move for several minutes. It was my first back spasm, and knocked me out of commission for a couple weeks.

Suddenly, things I took for granted, like getting up and looking in the fridge, were things I had to consider. I didn’t want to go anywhere, because it hurt to breathe, much less move. But in that time, I had to fly cross-country to tend to my grandmother in her final days, and that meant managing my pain while my back was screaming in an airplane seat, and then being wrenched as I carried all my luggage. It was the first time that my mobility was reduced, the first time I preferred elevators to taking the stairs two at a time, and the first time I had to depend on other people to help me do what I considered to be basic tasks.

It seems that since then, every six months I get a reminder that my body is not necessarily my friend. Most recently, I strained a ligament in my foot while exercising. Let me tell you, foot injuries suck. When your foot hurts, you keep hoping it doesn’t get worse. And when it doesn’t, you’re scared to do anything that might aggravate it again. So I had a very strange weekend that involved walking with a cane to keep weight off my foot.

It’s simple to look at people with a visible disability and say, I’m glad that’s not me. But you know what? Sooner or later, it will be.

Your vision will likely be the first thing to go. You may strain to read small type, at first. Then, maybe you’ll try bifocals. After that, as the effects of presbyopia set in, you’ll come to rely on your glasses to read. Your vision may start to yellow a bit, as well.

But wait! There’s more!

Hearing loss is a common side effect of the aging process. You may also encounter problems with arthritis (by the way: you’re not resting your wrists on the wrist rest while you’re typing, are you? Are you?), or any of a host of other fine or gross motor dysfunctions that will advance over time. And you may find that your cognitive abilities aren’t as sharp as they once were. (Hopefully before those around you start talking about it.)

I started doing web development when I was 20. At the time, it was barely conceivable to us that people of a certain age would be using the web. We didn’t even know if the web itself was going to last. But here it is, still chugging after a dozen and a half years, and not looking a day over 10.

And nowadays, I look around at the people I’ve worked with, and some of them are really old. Like, in their fifties! Some have even retired — the kind of retired where they’re collecting Social Security and posting pictures of their grandkids to Flickr. Get it? They’re using Flickr. And YouTube. And Gmail, and Twitter, and especially eBay. They also tend to have money to spend, and companies tend to like people like that.

And yet, I still hear people dismissing accessibility for older people on the web. That’s not going to fly any longer. Younger people are coming up on the web, that’s true. But those of us already there are only getting older, and we’re not going to stop liking the web anytime soon.

Keep this in mind when you’re about to downplay whether older users will want to use your site. The right thing to ask is:

Will you want to use this site when you’re older?

Or maybe, do you want some 20-year-old smartass deciding you won’t?

Okay. That felt good. Now that I’ve resurfaced, here’s the update.

I won’t be at SXSW this year. Sorry. I really wish I could, especially after seeing some of the accessibility sessions. If you’re going, do not miss Derek Featherstone’s Star Wars session, or Gez Lemon’s ARIA primer.

I will be at the CSUN conference, that being the biggest accessibility and technology conference around. I’m giving a talk about building accessible web content with Dreamweaver and Flash CS3 on Wednesday, March 12. Do drop by, won’t you?

I also spoke at Ignite Seattle two weeks ago, and I’m really happy with the feedback I received. The video should be posted shortly, at which time I will relay it to y’all. It’s only 5 minutes long, so it shouldn’t be too painful.

I’m still taking Arabic. I’m finishing 203 this month, then starting 204. I’m planning a trip to Jordan in April (yay, frequent flyer miles!). A classmate just sent me an email showing that the Foreign Service Institute’s rated time to reach professional proficiency in Arabic is 1950 hours, or 30 hours a week for 65 weeks. Woohoo! Only 1800 hours to go!

And Adobe is still my employer. (I know. I’m as surprised as you are.) As great as it is, it’s still a bit strange working for a company where you can be around for three years and still be considered a noob. I’m about 9 months in, so that reality is just now setting in.

Finally, my time as Seattle’s grandmaster speller will run out in April, as the third and final season of the Seattle Spelling Bee comes to a close. To all you young spellers out there, a bit of advice: don’t let all the fame and the groupies go to your head. Always remember, it’s about the orthography.

It must have been some kind of event for me to break my blogging silence.

I read about the IE 8 beta (and I’ll test it for myself as soon as I prep a fresh virtual machine…). Key features include support for the WAI-ARIA spec, and Acid2 compliance. Chris Wilson apparently also said during his talk today at Mix that they’re aiming for full support for CSS 2.1.

Okay, guys. You win. I’m impressed. There, I said it. I said something nice about Microsoft. I even did it on my Tablet PC, running Vista, just for good measure.

I was one of many who groaned at IE 7 when it caused a new round of conditional comment breakage, and when its own issues started to pinch authors into making more tweaks just to keep standards-based development working. Back then, I saw it as a small step forward for a team that had just been reassembled. I hoped for big things to come after - big, positive things - but so far, if the bits resemble the hype, let me be the first to welcome Microsoft back to the standards-based web.

There have been almost too many battles to name in the web standards arena over the last several years, and there are still some that make me itch. The <canvas> element springs to mind. But the thought of every major vendor finally supporting HTML 4.01 and CSS 2.1 has left me almost giddy, and ARIA support in all the major browsing platforms just puts me over the top. I think it can now be said that the standardistas have finally got what they wanted: a stable contract with browsers that what they code is what the user will get.

What next? Oh, I don’t know. How about we gather up everybody still designing web sites in 2008 using layout tables, font tags, and the like, and run them out of town on a rail? Who’s with me?

Wow. What a week. It’s been good enough that I’m actually blogging again. (Hey, remember when Matt used to blog?)

I spoke at Fundamentos Web 2007 in Gijón on Wednesday. The topic was designing new technology to build on the accessibility we already have, rather than stripping it away. The audience was fantastic, and the people who put the show on deserve recognition as the best conference organizers I’ve ever worked with. All of that more than made up for the fact that I was speaking some 20 hours after arriving in town, after 25 hours of travel, and that my MacBook Pro crashed while I was plugging in, and wasn’t in a usable state for another 20 minutes, and that I had to follow Jeremy Keith and Jeffrey Veen. You know. No pressure.

I’m in Madrid today, and I’m officially on vacation. It’s a great feeling to be in a city that makes time for napping, especially since the bar-restaurant-club progression usually starts around 8 or later in the evening, and doesn’t finish until 3 or 4 in the morning, if you’re lucky. And I can never sleep in past 8:30, so the siesta is very worthwhile.

Last night, my former coworker Charles took us out to the neighborhood bar. After the bartender poured us our cañas (small beers, always served with tapas), I offered one of my hosts some cash, and Chaals, an Australian who knows his way around this part of town, told me: “They won’t take your money here.” When I inquired further, I was informed that until he was finally able to order drinks like a local, they refused to let him pay.

At all.

For two years.

Later in the evening, after the sit-down dinner, we played darts in a Communist Party headquarters. The place was covered in pictures of Che. It was a pretty trippy evening. I’m leaving in a bit to try to see a Real Madrid match. (Getafe, where I’m staying, and Atlético are both playing away matches.) I was going to try to make it to Bilbao to see the Guggenheim, but I don’t think the travel gods are with me this time around. I’ve only been gone a week, and already I’ve had a full trip. Just wait until I get to Cairo.

If you’re in Seattle for Bumbershoot, the music and arts festival that marks the official end of sunlight summer in the Northwest, there’s an exhibition at the Seattle Rep on Sunday from 7:30-8:45pm, featuring the reigning Grand Champion of the Seattle Spelling Bee.

Me!

The top 4 spellers from last month’s finals, including my good friend Gretta, will compete for the Bumbershoot crowd. As finalist and former champ Gavin Borchert writes in Seattle Weekly, we will be at a disadvantage in that there won’t be a full bar at our disposal, but to make up for that fact, we will have a group of youth spelling bee champions to protect us from ass-of-ourselves-making. It’s really a fun event, with audience participation and all that, so feel free to join us.

Oh, and if any of you wanted to make huge cardboard “WE *heart* MATT” signs, that would be pretty cool, too.

On Monday, August 20th, I’ll be speaking at Refresh Seattle (Ballard Library, 5614 22nd Ave. NW) from 6-7:30pm. Attendance is free, but you totally have to buy me a beer afterward. (Okay. Maybe just one of you. Sixty would be too many.)
One talk about accessible design ain’t enough, Jack. You’d better make it three. The talk is titled “Web Accessibility in Three Acts”. These mini-talks will cover:

• Everything you should probably know by now as a web designer or developer;
• What to look forward to with new web technologies and advanced accessibility techniques; and
• Accessibility hacks – what you can do with the tools that come free with your operating system.

Yes, I will be talking about Ajax, Flash and Flex. Yes, I may even say “Rich Internet Applications.” Things are moving so fast in this space that it’s hard to know what to say even in an hour and a half, especially to tired, thirsty people. Hopefully, this one is going to be fun for the whole family. Bring your engineers! Your product managers! Everybody is invited!

Today at work, the fire alarm went off, and I was reminded of what the HR person told me during orientation on Monday: if you get outside and there’s no ice cream, then it’s not a drill.

We got ice cream.

As some of you may have heard, this week I started in my new position as Adobe’s accessibility engineer. I’ve known many of my new coworkers at Adobe for years now, and it’s great to be able to finally get me a copy of CS3 – I mean, to have such talented people around me. I’m working out of the Seattle office, next door to where I got married, and across the street from the Blue Flavor guys. All systems are go.

And hey, while I’m at it, here’s a brief history of my 2007 so far. Since the first of the year, I had been working in Amazon.com’s enterprise group on the front end for their newest merchant. That site went live last Tuesday. (Rumor control: no, they didn’t hire me to do accessibility work. No, I didn’t have anything to do with the NFB agreement. In fact, I never even talked with anyone who works on Amazon’s core site, that I know of. Hopefully this ends that little telephone game.)

Also, as of today, I am a second-year Arabic student. I’ve been studying at the Seattle Language Academy (which, conveniently, is a 5-minute walk from Adobe) since last June. The number one question I’ve had to answer since then has been, why Arabic? (Although “Can you get Photoshop for me?” is giving it a run for its money.) The answer is that I’m an infojunkie, and most of the important info is, unsurprisingly, coming from the Arab world. It’s a language that’s beautiful and complex, and I will (ٍإن شاء الله) stick with it until I have a good enough basis to move on from Modern Standard Arabic, or فصحى (fusHa), to colloquial, or عامية (ameyya).

So, that’s the news. No more fire drills for a while.

Question: What do you like least about eMusic.com?

Answer: At the moment, the fact that you use Zoomerang, whose survey interface is buggy on Firefox when it has no excuse to be.

I mean, come on. How can a survey engine be dumb enough to forget what users are entering, then not only fail to validate the submitted form on the client side, but have such terse errors that you might not even notice they’re there? I filled out two different companies’ surveys on that site in the last three days, and had the same problem each time. If you want me to spend my time providing feedback, the least you can do is not waste any more of it than is absolutely necessary. From now on, Zoomerang requests go straight to /dev/null.

You know what I like? Subtlety.

While I was at the Web 2.0 Expo this week, I went to a party held by one of the sponsors. (Which one is sort of irrelevant to the story.) There was a point where the DJ stopped, and the sponsor’s rep came out and said a few words.

Now, this is the part I loved. After the rep walked off, the next song the DJ spun was Jamiroquai’s “Virtual Insanity”. And that’s when I started laughing my ass off. I like lyrics, see, and knowing as many DJs as I do, I can tell when they do, too.  The song’s chorus contains the following lyric:

(we) always seem to be governed by this love we have for useless twisting of our new technology

Coincidence? You decide. I’m inclined to believe it wasn’t. Did anyone else notice?