User talk:Mpt
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Hi, welcome to Wikipedia! I just wanted to explain why I reverted your change to Wikipedia:How to edit a page. Our current policy (As stated on that page) for ALT text in images is to use meaningful ALT text wherever possible. This is required by HTML 4.0, recommended by the W3C, required by U.S. and some international law in some contexts, and generally just very helpful to the people who can't see images. Recommending that we do away with the ALT text by placing " " in the ALT tag is a considerable change of policy; if you feel that we should make such a policy change, please feel free to open discussion of the matter at Wikipedia talk:How to edit a page. Thanks! -- Wapcaplet 13:28 7 Jun 2003 (UTC)
- Thanks for the welcome, Wapcaplet. Yours is a common misconception about the role of ALT text in accessibility. I've explained proper use of ALT text in Wikipedia talk:How to edit a page, but I'm not going to get into a reversion tussle or a mass removal of those ALT texts which are bad for blind users and other text-only readers. I'll just fix them as I come across them. -- :Mpt 00:28 8 Jun 2003 (UTC)
Great work on Wikipedia:Alternate text for images. And thanks for pointing out the error of my ways. I apologize for the way I jumped on your initial contribution; I just tend to be hasty sometimes. Anyway, it's good to have you here, and I hope you'll stick around! -- Wapcaplet 16:21 9 Jun 2003 (UTC)
- Hey, I understand completely. When the first contribution of a newly-registered contributor effectively amounted to a change in policy, it would be natural to assume it was misguided. -- Mpt 16:53 9 Jun 2003 (UTC)
Regarding alt text - would you like to look at meta:image pages? There are some suggestions for generating alt text from the image description page that I think might benefit from your experise... Martin
Have another official welcome to Wikipedia! I've long realised that Wikipdia wasn't so hot on accessibility but had little idea how to help. Hopefully, you can get us going on this!
(Obligatory bad thing: I don't know about anybody else, but I find it awkward to read the source and diffs when you use "smart" quotes like ’. But at least you're not using Windows 1252 -- yech! ^_^)
-- Toby Bartels 09:11 12 Jun 2003 (UTC)
- Thanks, Toby. :-) I'll disagree with you on the quotes for now - uglifying the encyclopedia, so as to make the source/diffs prettier, seems very much like the tail wagging the dog. -- Mpt 15:09 12 Jun 2003 (UTC)
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- On wikis, anyone can edit any page. This is, for me, a fundamental part of wiki philosophy, and anyone means anyone. That's why we aim to make the markup as simple to use as possible (with mixed success, arguably). Hence, ampersand-hash-number-semicolon really isn't appropriate, except where it's essential. Thanks. Martin 16:34 12 Jun 2003 (UTC)
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- Grumble grumble grumble grumble okay. -- Mpt
A dittoe on most of the above. I use a 133 Mhz pentium machine with only 32 megabytes memory, and thus am in practise forced toward using a text only browser. Not saying that is the same as using a braille display or speech synthesizer, but makes me appreciate the KISS interface of the wikipedia. Cimon Avaro on a pogo stick 09:26 12 Jun 2003 (UTC)
[Accessibility bugs discussion moved to meta:Image pages.] -- Mpt 13:25 13 Jun 2003 (UTC)
Hiya! You've gotten me thinking about Wikipedia's accessibility. Images are only the beginning, though. I would be interested to know what ideas you might have for articles which make extensive use of tables, such as the articles on chemical elements (Hydrogen, Helium, etc.) Many of these suffer from subtly improper use of tables (formatted for sighted users only), and would probably benefit from better markup -- appropriate uses of th, heading tags for what are obviously headings, general simplification, etc. (not to mention they look pretty horrid in Lynx -- I can only imagine what they'd be like in speech browsers). Anyway, since there are many articles which use tables like this, it'd be great if we could put our heads together and come up with some more accessible solutions. This may involve adding features to the Wiki software, but is more likely to simply require the addition of a few class descriptors to the Wikipedia style sheet. I'd love to hear your input! -- Wapcaplet 11:47 27 Jun 2003 (UTC)
- I've set up a meta page called m:Wikipedia accessibility for discussion of this and other issues. -- Wapcaplet 12:04 27 Jun 2003 (UTC)
