Re: [office-accessibility] Do we need a "decorative" attribute for imagesin ODF?

[robert_weir@us.ibm.com]

At the lowest level there is a difference between:

1) An element that contains an attribute "foo" with an empty string "" as 
a value

2) An element that does not contain an attribute "foo"

3) An element that does not contain an attribute "foo" where the default 
value for foo is ""

However, once the XML is parsed and morphed into the internal object model 
of an editor, these three situations are almost always conflated.  So if 
you want to make a distinction between implicit versus explicit lack of 
alt text, then we probably need another attribute for it.

I assume this would be useful for accessibility proofers as well, e.g., 
don't warn the user about the lack of alt text on this image, since it has 
already been declared as decorative.

And as a secondary use, I could imagine a "green" print mode where you 
save ink by not printing purely decorative images, and only printing the 
content that carries meaning.

-Rob


Malte Timmermann <malte.timmermann@oracle.com> wrote on 10/27/2010 
03:41:41 AM:
> 
> [office-accessibility] Do we need a "decorative" attribute for images in 
ODF?
> 
> Hi,
> 
> it's been a while that we had to discuss something on this list, so let
> me bring up something ;)
> 
> I have been made aware that we might need some "decorative" attribute
> for images in ODF.
> 
> Somebody created a document in ODF, and wanted to export it in an
> accessible way as HTML.
> 
> The document contains regular images and decorative images.
> 
> In HTML, we would need to create an empty ALT tag for the decorative
> images, which is different than not creating an ALT tag at all.
> 
> But if we did so with every image that has no alternative text, this
> would probably happen in 99% of all documents w/o intention, because
> many people don't properly set alternative text everywhere where needed.
> 
> In ODF, it should probably be possible to explicitly flag an image as
> decorative.
> 
> Any thoughts?
> 
> Malte.
> 
> 
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