Deliberate, and for accessibility (there'll be a section about it in the next news post): there was information available in the alt text (for screenreaders, etc) that was not also available to non-screenreader users via the title text (the thing that your browser shows you on hover), which is bad practice for usability. (Ideally, no information should *only* be available to sighted users, or *only* be available to screenreader users, or *only* be available to keyboard users vs mouse users, etc. There's a problem in that the hover menu and the title tip information on images aren't accessible to people who can't use the mouse or who can't use cursor hover such as mobile browser users, but that's the next problem we're brainstorming on solving.)
(You also run into a problem in that the standards say that alt and title shouldn't be the same, but we worked around that by changing the order in which username/description/keyword/comment appear, moving the information more likely to be useful to visual vs screenreader use closer to the front of the text strings so the content is the same but presented in a different order. We're also not above ignoring standards when standards work against accessibility rather than for it; accessibility for people with disabilities of all types -- not just "screen reader users", which is what many sites mean when they talk about accessible design -- is one of our key principles and it drives many of our decisions, if not most of them, in some shape or form.)
Also, by showing icon descriptions if they exist (see the title text on my icon for instance; its 'description' is the bit in parentheses) our hope is that it will make more people aware that descriptions exist, and encourage them to fill them out if they haven't already. The description is what's read to screenreader users (and shown to people using text-only browsers) for them to know what the icon consists of, since so many people use icons as an additional channel of metadata about the comment and that informational channel is lost to non-visual access. Many people have filled out the description fields of their icons (I've managed to describe all the ones on this account and about 3/4ths of the ones on my pesonal account! finally) but many more haven't, and we're hoping that by showing people (a bit of) what screenreader users experience when they use an icon, it will help them realize why it's important to add those descriptions.
People weren't using the description field to describe their icons because they never saw those descriptions and it's hard for someone who's never seen/used a screenreader to know how it presents information! (I have a friend who's blind and once I asked her if she'd mind demonstrating how she interacts with the internet. It was stunning. The screenreader reads at like 4x a 'normal' human speed and she can tell what she's hearing within fractions of a second to skip ahead if she's not interested in that section. The end result sounds like Mickey Mouse on helium with a horrible habit of cutting himself off one syllable into every word, and yet she understands it perfectly. It's kind of amazing.) So, by showing the description field, people can know what it is that screenreader users are hearing.
We wavered back and forth over whether to include the comment field, especially since in practice it's mostly used as a dumping ground for "notes about the icon geared towards display on the /icons page" instead of being information that's most useful at the time of viewing; I'm still not 100% convinced that the comment field has to be there. (We've been dithering about it for over a year and a half, actually; the discussion started up 2010-07-13 and continued on and off until earlier this month when we finally threw up our hands and said fuck it, we'll make a decision even if it's not the version that ends up sticking around.) But the description, yeah, we think exposing that is an important part of our accesibility commitment, because it will hopefully keep that information from being hidden away in alt text and keep people from not even realizing that the description field exists.
(Every browser handles alt text slightly differently, but none of the Big Ones ever use it for the hover-over tooltip; they all use the title attribute for that. It's very, very annoying, and a real mistake from an accessibility standpoint, because it means that visually-oriented users have no idea what alt text is or does or should be used for in most cases.)
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(You also run into a problem in that the standards say that alt and title shouldn't be the same, but we worked around that by changing the order in which username/description/keyword/comment appear, moving the information more likely to be useful to visual vs screenreader use closer to the front of the text strings so the content is the same but presented in a different order. We're also not above ignoring standards when standards work against accessibility rather than for it; accessibility for people with disabilities of all types -- not just "screen reader users", which is what many sites mean when they talk about accessible design -- is one of our key principles and it drives many of our decisions, if not most of them, in some shape or form.)
Also, by showing icon descriptions if they exist (see the title text on my icon for instance; its 'description' is the bit in parentheses) our hope is that it will make more people aware that descriptions exist, and encourage them to fill them out if they haven't already. The description is what's read to screenreader users (and shown to people using text-only browsers) for them to know what the icon consists of, since so many people use icons as an additional channel of metadata about the comment and that informational channel is lost to non-visual access. Many people have filled out the description fields of their icons (I've managed to describe all the ones on this account and about 3/4ths of the ones on my pesonal account! finally) but many more haven't, and we're hoping that by showing people (a bit of) what screenreader users experience when they use an icon, it will help them realize why it's important to add those descriptions.
People weren't using the description field to describe their icons because they never saw those descriptions and it's hard for someone who's never seen/used a screenreader to know how it presents information! (I have a friend who's blind and once I asked her if she'd mind demonstrating how she interacts with the internet. It was stunning. The screenreader reads at like 4x a 'normal' human speed and she can tell what she's hearing within fractions of a second to skip ahead if she's not interested in that section. The end result sounds like Mickey Mouse on helium with a horrible habit of cutting himself off one syllable into every word, and yet she understands it perfectly. It's kind of amazing.) So, by showing the description field, people can know what it is that screenreader users are hearing.
We wavered back and forth over whether to include the comment field, especially since in practice it's mostly used as a dumping ground for "notes about the icon geared towards display on the /icons page" instead of being information that's most useful at the time of viewing; I'm still not 100% convinced that the comment field has to be there. (We've been dithering about it for over a year and a half, actually; the discussion started up 2010-07-13 and continued on and off until earlier this month when we finally threw up our hands and said fuck it, we'll make a decision even if it's not the version that ends up sticking around.) But the description, yeah, we think exposing that is an important part of our accesibility commitment, because it will hopefully keep that information from being hidden away in alt text and keep people from not even realizing that the description field exists.
(Every browser handles alt text slightly differently, but none of the Big Ones ever use it for the hover-over tooltip; they all use the title attribute for that. It's very, very annoying, and a real mistake from an accessibility standpoint, because it means that visually-oriented users have no idea what alt text is or does or should be used for in most cases.)