WCAG rot
I popped a patch into DSpace to leave empty alt text for thumbnails on item pages. Every single person I know who relies on screen readers for the Web tells me that putting an image filename as alt text (which is what DSpace currently does) is intensely bothersome.
Patch got rejected. Why? Because WCAG says there has to be a text equivalent for everything. Naughty naughty, no alt text.
Grargh. I am annoyed. Why does WCAG rot have to get in the way of doing the right thing?
I resubmitted the patch with “thumbnail” as alt text, because that’s a marginal improvement over the filename. I think it deeply stupid that I have to do that, because it means dumping another line into the internationalization file, but so it goes.