Even then it would not really be accessible. Alternative texts are just text blobs without any semantics and are read by screenreaders without any interruption.

There's a link to the transcript at the bottom.

Goes against the idea that all users should have "full and equal enjoyment" of a site instead of a "separate but equal" version just for "them."

There's massive controversy in the disabled community over alternate site versions that's far too complicated to get into.

Everyone I've heard from thinks a separate site is better than a massive alt though. Many screen readers handle them extremely poorly, and they can't be annotated with html tags to indicate semantics (link, list, etc).

Is that really a goal of accessibility, though? Are image descriptions not "separate"? If this is not enough, should no one have any images on the web at all?

I don't think we should discourage people from setting up systems that have this kind of accessibility, even if it's not as "pure" from the perspective of duplicated content.

Indeed, the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines explicitly allow creating a separate accessible version of content and linking to it. They call it a "conforming alternate version": https://www.w3.org/TR/2016/NOTE-WCAG20-TECHS-20161007/G190

(The guidelines say it's preferred for everything to conform directly, but they use "artistic integrity" as an example of a situation where a conforming alternate version could be used. I'd say that applies here.)

Yes, it's an explicit goal of accessibility, and predates the web

Can you cite someone talking about this? Another commenter has pointed to w3 stuff on non-conforming versions and from there I got here: https://www.w3.org/TR/UNDERSTANDING-WCAG20/conformance.html#... .

You can't make a text description of a guitar solo that's "equal", much less not "separate"; I don't buy that people really think that we therefore shouldn't have music.

So how did we encode smells for the noseless before the web?

Losing our sense of smell is actually somewhat dangerous and more common than you think (can be lost temporarily due to illness).

So we install smoke detectors and put expiration dates on things to detect danger without smell.

Yeah but how do you encode the smell of a rose to someone without a nose? You're being incredibly discriminatory by only giving the smelless a warning and nothing else.

Great question! People with a typical sense of smell get to experience the smell of expired food already, adding expiration dates for who can't is inclusive, not ex.

That's not the question I asked.