RE: longdesc using #id

I also concur with Chaals that this is a use case that would be good for
Longdesc, and that HTML4 allows for it, but that the spec provided no
example, and did not mention it ...
 I support its inclusion in our extension... I just think we're being a bit
strident to say its non-implementation for over 15 years is a "bug".

	>> ... there have been implementation reports that some screen
reader / browser combinations don't handle this well.

Is there one implementation (Browser/AT combination) that *does* handle it
well? Or was there *ever* a combination that did?

I think we should say it like it is... that HTML4 does allow for a #id to
point to the same page, but no one ever did... and at the time, if I
remember correctly, the team was looking for an alternative to "D" link, and
the thinking was a description separate page, because they thought sighted
people didn't need the description... (there was not much understanding at
the time of the needs of the cognitive community)

There is room to interpret HTML4 this way, but there has never been an
implementation of it in 15 years, and therefore it is effectively a new
proposed behaviour, which I wholeheartedly support.

Cheers
David MacDonald

CanAdapt Solutions Inc.
  Adapting the web to all users
            Including those with disabilities
www.Can-Adapt.com

-----Original Message-----
From: Steve Faulkner [mailto:faulkner.steve@gmail.com] 
Sent: November-23-12 6:36 AM
To: HTML Accessibility Task Force
Subject: Re: longdesc using #id



Chair hat off.

I concur with chaals on this.

Regards
Steve

On 23 Nov 2012, at 14:21, "Charles McCathie Nevile" <chaals@yandex-team.ru>
wrote:

> (chair hat off)
> 
> Hi,
> 
> there has been some discussion about longdescs whose URL is a relative
reference to somewhere in the page. And there have been implementation
reports that some screen reader / browser combinations don't handle this
well.
> 
> I think that is a bug in the relevant software (maybe screenreader, maybe
the underlying browser). There is a demo of longdesc that Patrick Lauke
wrote to go with his Firefox extension, last updated in 2008, which uses
internal page links, and the extension as well as the browser-native
implementations of iCab and Opera all handle the case of an internal
reference just as they would an external one.
> 
> In the original HTML specification of longdesc, the value of the attribute
is given as URI, and that can be an internal or an absolute link (the same
as the href attribute for a link). I don't know of any evidence that
longdesc was intended to only work on external pages, despite some
implementations failing if you don't do that.
> 
> During the seemingly endless discussions of ISSUE-30 in the HTML WG, one
argument raised against longdesc was that it forced the description to be on
a separate page. This assertion is not backed up by the spec, but by some
implementations.
> 
> It seems to me that there are valid use cases for having the description
on the same page as an image, and pointing to it. So I think the HTML 4 spec
was right, and we should re-affirm that, and file bugs against the software
that doesn't implement it properly. (I have already done this for the Yandex
browser...)
> 
> cheers
> 
> Chaals
> 
> -- 
> Charles McCathie Nevile - Consultant (web standards) CTO Office, Yandex
>      chaals@yandex-team.ru         Find more at http://yandex.com
>

Received on Friday, 23 November 2012 13:59:30 UTC