<BOGGLE> What suffering is caused by decent alt text?!
The suffering of the author having to put in a little bit of extra effort,
apparently. I've got this sort of old-fashioned belief that if it can't be
done without cutting corners, it's not worth doing, but then what do I
know?
The Perl community has the concepts of "true Lazyness" and "false
Lazyness." The virtue of True Lazyness involves possibly putting in a
little bit of extra effort on one's own part in order to minimize the
effort that everybody else has to put in. The vice of False Lazyness
involves offloading a little bit of your own effort to thousands (at least)
of other people, thus massively increasing the total amount of effort
required.
Creating accessible pages is True Lazyness. Creating inaccessible pages is
False Lazyness. The OP talked about a blind user encountering an
inaccessible page and needing to call the organization responsible for the
page (what if that contact information isn't accessible) or bringing in a
sighted person to read it. If he does either, right away he's put in more
effort than it would take for the author to have made the page accessible.
Even if he's the only one who has to put in that effort. If that isn't
False Lazyness, I don't know what is.
A good way to tell whether you're being Truly Lazy or Falsely Lazy is to
ask yourself "would I make this decision if I had to offer 24/7/365 tech
support for my creation?" Kind of a milder version of the (possibly
apocryphal) old Roman requirement that the engineer who designed a bridge
had to stand underneath it on the day it was opened.