[LINK] eCensus web page design

[Tom Worthington]

At 10:15 AM 8/4/2006, Roger Clarke wrote:
>At 9:26 +1000 4/8/06, Tom Worthington wrote:
>>... decorative and would be better with an empty ALT tag to 
>>indicate it conveys no useful information.
>
><Null> means ... well ... null ...

Sorry, I was being a bit cryptic. The accepted approach in web 
accessibility is to indicate a decorative image with an empty ALT tag:

         alt=""

The term used for this is "null alt text". That term may not make 
sense, but that is what it is called.

A Braille display or talking computer will ignore an image labelled 
with null alt text. If you don't put in any ALT tag, the system will 
say something like "IMAGE". So the reader can distinguish between no 
ALT text and null alt text.

The problem is to dissuade well meaning people from putting useless 
text in the ALT field such as "horizontal line". Some web creation 
software puts in default values, such as the file name of the image. 
ALT text such as "IMG0012.JPG" is not a lot of use to anyone.

>Better would be some designated standard ...

The use of null alt text is being codified in the new version 2 of 
the W3C Web Accessibility guidelines 
<http://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG20-GENERAL/#F38>.

>I suggest the reserved term / meta-symbol 'Eye Candy'. ...

There is still time to suggest that for the new standard. But I don't 
fancy your changes.

ps: A null value is not the same thing as nothing: it is something 
inserted to indicate nothing (a particular sort of nothing). The talk 
of null values reminds me of statistical packages which have lots of 
different "missing" values. You can not only do analysis of the data 
you have, but of the different sorts of data you don't have.



Tom Worthington FACS HLM tom.worthington at tomw.net.au Ph: 0419 496150
Director, Tomw Communications Pty Ltd            ABN: 17 088 714 309
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Director, ACS Communications Tech Board   http://www.acs.org.au/ctb/
Visiting Fellow, ANU      Blog: http://www.tomw.net.au/blog/atom.xml