Comment on Mozilla Firefox new alt-text generator powered by "fully private on-device AI model"
IllNess@infosec.pub 6 months ago
But even for a simple static page there are certain types of information, like alternative text for images, that must be provided by the author to provide an understandable experience for people using assistive technology (as required by the spec)
I wonder if this includes websites that use <figcaption>
with alt
emptied.
Kissaki@beehaw.org 6 months ago
MDN
<figure>
and<figcaption>
has no mention of changed img alt intentions. Which makes sense to me.figure does not invalidate or change how img is to be used. The caption may often not but can differ from the image description. If alt describes the image, figcaption captions it.
IllNess@infosec.pub 6 months ago
Yes you can use both but I’ve seen some front end developers blank out
alt
altogether when they are usingfigcaption
.I did not find this practice in MDN Web Docs but I found it in an other place:
This doesn’t have to do with
figcaption
but a blind user in Stack Overflow suggested you should empty outalt
for actionable objects.I was just wondering what Mozilla’s method was for finding these images and if they took other things in to consideration like decorative images.
Kissaki@beehaw.org 6 months ago
Interesting. It also made me look at the MDN docs again. img alt is consistent to that. I wasn’t aware of the empty for omittable images.
I also looked at
figure
again, and in my interpretation it does declare thatfigcaption
is to be used.figure
represents self-contained content.figcaption
provides the accessible name for the parent. The accessible name is is the text associated with an HTML element that provides users of assistive technology with a label for the element.The resolution order being aria-labelledby, aria-label, input[type=button][value], input[type=image]|img|area[alt], …
So
figcaption
takes priority overimg
alt
.IllNess@infosec.pub 6 months ago
Thanks for the info. The Accessible name calculation page is really interesting.
Kissaki@beehaw.org 6 months ago
Where is that quote from?
IllNess@infosec.pub 6 months ago
I put a link after the quote. That’s the source.