RE: code samples for extended description

On 13 Jan 2016 2:17 a.m., "White, Jason J" <jjwhite@ets.org> wrote:
> 
> Finding out to what extent people are in fact annoyed by such additional text would be worthy of an empirical investigation.

On Wed, 13 Jan 2016, Siegman, Tzviya - Hoboken wrote:

> Whether the additional text would annoy or disrupt people, of course, depends on context. But, if the text gets in designers’ way (or is
> perceived to), no one will use this solution, so I don’t think it’s a good starting point.

In fact, one of the requirements for the extended description was that it MUST be something which can be hidden from the visual display, because of the legal or marketing requirements of individual publications. As Tzviya says, anything which cannot be hidden from visual design at all is a non-starter, either because designers/marketing people will insist on not using it, or because legal will have requirements obliging them not to use it. Detailed use cases of this are specked out in the original matrix.

There are already multiple examples on line of cases where the inability to hide extended text prevents people from using alt at all, in content management systems where if you fill out the alt it autopopulates either a visible caption (e.g. tumblr) or the title attribute (certain wordpress themes). I've seen plenty of cases where designers flat out refuse to use alt specifically because they want the visual elements to be more under their control. Those are not in the digital publishing industry, but the legal and marketing requirements in our matrix are.

Deborah Kaplan

Received on Wednesday, 13 January 2016 17:05:25 UTC