Caption and alt text should not be the same

  • I’ve just upgraded to 2.6, and very nice it is to, thanks for the good work.

    There is one thing that’s irritating me, though – the new caption system uses the same text for the caption and the alt text. This seems pretty clearly wrong, to me. The caption is to provide information about the image, while the alt text is to provide alternative content _to_ the image; these are not conceptually the same. Imagine, say, a graph; the caption should say what the graph represents, and perhaps where the data comes from, etc (“WordPress awesomeness by time, based on data from the WordPress Awesomeness Institute”). The alt text, on the other hand, should summarize the information (“WordPress awesomeness has increased from 90% awesome in 2006, to 120% awesome in 2008”).

    More immediately, making the caption and the alt text the same is pointless – it means that, if the user is not viewing images, they will see the same information _twice_. It would be good to be able to specify separate text for each, so that one can provide useful information about the image for the caption, while providing an alternative to the image in the alt text.

Viewing 13 replies - 1 through 13 (of 13 total)

  • I agree with you. IN fact, I don’t even want captions to appear unless I want them to… as it is right now I have to manually delete the caption code for each and every photo I put in a blog post and I put in a lot of photos on my blog. So unless I’m missing something as far as the automatic captioning goes, I don’t like how it’s been implemented at all.

    I agree alt tags are necessary for proper xhtml validation, caption are not. There really shouldn’t this condition of having to have captions to have alt text.

    Captions should not come from the alt text, it should come from another field such as the description, or better yet have it’s own input field.

    I can see this becoming quite an issue.

    Heh…I have a different problem: I can’t get the captions to appear, no matter what I do (to include uploading the new \wp-includes\functions.php file).

    ucla, don’t hijack this thread. You has a different issue; start a new thread.

    Just want to add my voice to this thread. This new caption feature is a bad idea from an accessibility point of view – alt text and captions are NOT the same.

    +1 on this one!

    So what happened to this? I’m also struggling with the alternate text. I can’t get it to work even when I’m using a caption. No matter what I do the alternate text is always the file name of the image.

    I too am curious about where this is going. As a long time accessibility consultant, I advise that alt text is a must and it must be an alternative to seeing the image. Title text and captions are optional and serve different purposes.

    If I were implementing the dialog, I would make alt text a required field with a helper label that says “describe the image.” I would make title an optional field with helper text that says “this appears as a tooltip.” I would make caption an optional field with helper text that says “this is always displayed next to the image.”

    This is a 2.6 barrier for me. The 2.5 implementation is incorrect and this enhancement only makes things worse.

    beernews

    (@beernews)

    +1

    denixoid

    (@denixoid)

    +1

    juliegomoll

    (@juliegomoll)

    I agree 100%. I’ve been proud of the attention I’ve paid to accessibility on my blog.

    Are there any plans to remedy this? It’s an egregious oversight.

    Robbi

    (@robbimcmillen)

    Good idea. Every captioned image I create I have to change the alt which is annoying considering the amount of sites I run.

    frankieroberto

    (@frankieroberto)

    Agree and have submitted Trac ticket here: https://trac.www.ads-software.com/ticket/8256

Viewing 13 replies - 1 through 13 (of 13 total)
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