Wikipedia talk:Alternative text for images

"refer to adjacent text"

This suggestion is never appropriate as alt text, and is in no way supported by the reference attached to it. Pretty troubling that it's been part of this page for so long. Unless I'm missing something critical, this should be removed. Chris Cunningham (user:thumperward: not at work) - talk 09:18, 9 October 2010 (UTC)

What is the matter? Could you please explain how you came to those two conclusions? This is an official WCAG 2.0 technique: G74: Providing a long description in text near the non-text content, with a reference to the location of the long description in the short description.

However, you may have some really awesome arguments, which makes you a better accessibility expert than all the guys who wrote WCAG 2.0 and the members of WebAIM. ;-) So please provide details. Dodoïste (talk) 10:50, 9 October 2010 (UTC)

Providing the location of the fuller explanation in the alt text is fine. Making that the sole content of the alt text certainly isn't. Chris Cunningham (user:thumperward: not at work) - talk 03:02, 11 October 2010 (UTC)

You have a point there. :D The guidelines for this technique are indeed vague, and I would not be surprised it this technique was badly applied. Do you have any examples of misuses? Dodoïste (talk) 03:22, 11 October 2010 (UTC)

No specific misuses except for the example in the guideline itself. Chris Cunningham (user:thumperward: not at work) - talk 03:29, 11 October 2010 (UTC)

OK. Well, sure. The example basically says "insert descriptive caption here", instead of giving an example of what would be a descriptive enough caption. If you can improve that - without removing, by rephrasing only - I'd be grateful. :-) Dodoïste (talk) 03:38, 11 October 2010 (UTC)

Infobox television

Has anybody noticed if you use alt= it no longer works but Alt= does.REVUpminster (talk) 00:15, 8 December 2010 (UTC)

• I might be wrong on this but some work, some do not.REVUpminster (talk) 00:26, 8 December 2010 (UTC)

Alt text for galleries

See Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2011-05-02/Technology report. I was the one who reported bugzilla:18682 a long time ago, and I'm very thankful to the developers for finally fixing it.

We'll soon be able to add alt text to our galleries. It's not live yet, though. It should go live a the next MediaWiki update, and I'm not sure when this will happen. Anyway, keep an eye on it, and see if it gets enabled in a near future. Yours, Dodoïste (talk) 07:52, 3 May 2011 (UTC)

Cool! :-) Graham87 09:36, 3 May 2011 (UTC)

Yeeeepee, it's live now! Altought it may have been live for quite some time already. Probably since MediaWiki 1.18 deployment in October. At any rate, we can now discuss its use, update best practices, and all. :-) Dodoïste (talk) 01:17, 7 December 2011 (UTC)

Well, on a second thought, since en.wiki uses mostly templates to generate galleries, best practices may not need be updated. However, it may be beneficial to update the templates. Templates currently create a table containing a list of images which have an alt text. We can now change it for a standard gallery. It's more semantic and accessible (no more table read aloud by screen readers, but silent divs). Dodoïste (talk) 01:48, 13 December 2011 (UTC)

MOS:CAPTION

One of your examples is "alt=Tony Blair and George W. Bush shaking hands at a press conference. " I'm in the habit of removing the period from such alt captions because it isn't a complete sentence, according to MOS:CAPTION. However, this page also says "link graphic Tony Blair and George W. Bush shaking hands at a press conference. Blair and Bush agree on a strategy for peace in the Middle East on 12 November 2004." Is that how it appears to a blind person? If so, then we need the period after "conference", because the "Blair and Bush" sentence appears immediately afterwards with no other punctuation. Art LaPella (talk) 14:35, 8 July 2011 (UTC)

A screen reader generally will not read a period, but merely pause. So the question is whether it already pauses enough after the link. I would think they would, but I don't know. — trlkly 21:24, 15 October 2011 (UTC)

"the alternative text ensures no information or functionality is lost"

Unless the alt text provides a pixel-by-pixel description of the image, the above statement, taken from the introductory paragraph, is simply not possible. A description can serve the same general purpose as the image, but it is not technically accurate to say that it conveys the same information. In addition, having no images, whether because of visual impairment or other reasons, is already a loss of functionality outside our control. Effective alt text can reduce its impact, but we should not pretend that we can eliminate it. Feezo (send a signal | watch the sky) 20:27, 30 July 2011 (UTC)

Yes, it should be reworded. The point is, for images such as File:Proteinsynthesis.png alt text is crucial to understand the content of the article (where this image is inserted). Alt text is needed when the image contains an information that is important to understand the subject of the article. If the information is already provided textually in the article, like in Cell (biology)#Creation, alt text is almost useless. Did my explanation helped ? Cheers, Dodoïste (talk) 01:58, 2 August 2011 (UTC)