Interview with the scientist who’s writing the Webb photos alt text

niemanlab.org

45 points·giuliomagnifico··24 comments

Is "alt text" a colloquialism understood by laymen? I typically use the term "text alternatives" when speaking with clients. It's a specific attribute, it might be supplanted by `aria-label`, etc

https://www.w3.org/WAI/WCAG21/Understanding/conformance#text...

I think it broadly is, yes. For example the text is available by an "ALT" button in the bottom-left of the image on Twitter, https://twitter.com/NASAWebb/status/1546621080298835970

The name most likely comes from the "alt" attribute for "img" tags in HTML, if I were to guess.

Meta: Super confusing how the way the links are formatted makes them look like strikethrough-text; this link explains the term if you’re not familiar with it:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strikethrough

The links appear underlined for me (using Firefox), not strikethroughed, and look perfectly fine.

Appears to be related to text-size settings, since if I enlarge the text, issue disappears.

Interesting. I know a lot of websites are designed with a font size of 16pt in mind, and you'll tend to encounter issues if you set the size to anything else. I find that rather a shame.

Used the same text settings for years, never seen this issue before.

Yeah, devs use `border-bottom` to get fancy but often don't test edge cases where it causes a strikethrough instead of an underline

He must have been the new guy.

An incredibly Lovecraftian job

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