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Comment by jwilk | Hacker News Reader

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jwilk·

If you want people to take your article seriously, then maybe you shouldn't put a pointless animated GIF in it.

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The HTML of the page doesn't contain "888". This makes it impossible for some disabled people to get the number at all.

This makes it a practical concern in addition to bad taste.

It's rather sad that none of the images (that I checked — I might be wrong) on blog.mozilla.org seem to have an alttext.

(For the record, while I generally dislike gifs, I don't have strong feelings, either way, regarding the animated image here.)

That is unfortunate. I'm not generally opposed to sensible use of images or (occasionally) gifs, but the practice of describing their contents in alttext is excellent - it enables both usability and machine-readability, and I really hope it catches on more widely.

And it flashes so fast, no human could actually call the number. It's very frustrating, even for able people!

This feels like one of those complaints only ever made because "others may find it objectionable". I've seen that sentiment ruin the best ideas with mediocracy. Maybe "Marketing Correctness" would be an appropriate term: "A creative idea that everyone thinks is extraordinarily good, but that nobody is willing to embrace because they expect others to complain".

I. e. what happens when you want to name an airline "Virgin", or a morning-after pill "Plan B" and aren't Richard Branson.

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