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Interview with the scientist who’s writing the Webb photos alt text (niemanlab.org)
45 points by giuliomagnifico on Aug 4, 2022 | hide | past | favorite | 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


[flagged]


Yeah, science is so dumb, isn't it? /s


Why is that?


Because it doesn't really mean anything nowadays does it? For instance the guy in question majored in History and Education.


Education isn't a science?


No, why do you think it is? You can do science in an educational setting, and education often relies on results from psychology or biology, but it's not a science.

Some would argue that educationalists often experiment on children, but that's not the goal (and of course that's a minor aspect of education).


It sounds like you don't really know what science is, or education.


This will be news to the millions of people who have earned Bachelors of Science degrees in Education.


Ironically, Sir Isaac Newton (whom I'd consider a scientist) actually earned a Bachelor of Arts. I would say the degree doesn't matter, the practice of science is what makes a scientist.


> Ironically, Sir Isaac Newton (whom I'd consider a scientist) actually earned a Bachelor of Arts

Bachelor of Science didn't exist until the mid 19th century. Historically, the four faculties of arts, law, divinity, and theology each had bachelors and terminal (eventually standardized as doctor for all except arts, and master for arts) degrees. The explosion of other degrees (and masters as an intermediate degree, rather than a terminal one, in many fields) is a relatively recent phenomenon.


Oh come on, most attorneys have Juris Doctor degrees, we don't call them Dr. Lawyer.

I know an illustrator with a B.S. in design.


Oh come on, most attorneys have Juris Doctor degrees, we don't call them Dr. Lawyer.

There are lots of people we call "doctor." The ones with Ph.D's. And some of them are lawyers, and are addressed as "doctor."

Also interesting: There was an HN comment a few weeks ago that pointed to a helpful link which demonstrated that the idea of "doctor" didn't start with medical doctors and spread to other disciplines, it was the other way around.

I know I was surprised.


> There are lots of people we call "doctor." The ones with Ph.D's

No, the ones with doctorates. A JD's technically a doctorate, a graduate degree, but it would be silly to expect people call you "doctor" because you have one.


Which is indicative of how the word has changed; scientist now means more "knowledge worker" than it does "person doing careful experiments to discover new things".


Hence my initial point ¯\_(ツ)_/¯




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