Re: Nothing is really hidden

On Wed, Jul 1, 2009 at 1:00 PM, Shelley Powers<shelley.just@gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> I *think* that it's meant in the sense that these features are hidden
>> to the person authoring the page. And to the people "QA-ing" the page.
>> So for example the author of the page is not using AT tools, it
>> doesn't help him/her, in the process of authoring the page, that AT
>> tools exposes @summary.
>>
>> Similarly, if the person testing the page before it us published
>> doesn't use AT tools, he or she will not see any wrong values in the
>> @summary attribute.
>
> True, there may be some tools that automatically fill in the summary
> attribute with incorrect values, and the web page author is not
> allowed to edit the field via the tool. But I would say that was a
> problem with the tool, not necessarily @summary.

Why only tools that automatically fill in the summary? What if the
ability to fill it out is hidden away in some 'table properties'
dialog box? Or what if the summary was filled out back when the site
was created using a plain texteditor and has been left since then.

> As far as I know, the
> value isn't hidden from either the author or QA, regardless. At a
> minimum, they could check the value by looking at the page source.

I don't think your average QA person is going to look at the page
source to ensure that it is correct.

>> I think that it's very interesting to look at the differences between
>> <img alt> and <table summary>. There are two important differences
>> between them. First of all alt was a required attribute in HTML 4, so
>> people validating their pages got an error if no @alt was included.
>>
>> Second, and I believe just as importantly, for a very long time (maybe
>> still?) IE used to display the @alt attribute as a tooltip (if no
>> @title attribute was present). That meant that the @alt attribute was
>> somewhat visible to everyone. Even people without AT-tools. This lead
>> to outdated or flat out wrong @alt values would be more likely to be
>> detected pretty quickly and fixed.
>>
>
> You know, and this could only be me, but I don't use IE, except
> briefly to test a page. I'm learning how to correctly add alt text
> more from discussions on web sites, and my own increasing interest in
> making my sites more accessible. My use of alt isn't perfect, but is
> improving. The fact that it shows up on a tooltip has never made a
> difference.
>
> Perhaps others have felt that alt as tooltip in IE has helped them
> improve their alt text.

I'd be careful with drawing conclusions based on how people in this
forum act. The mere fact that you are taking part in the HTML WG to me
means that you are not an average author, but likely more passionate
about creating HTML than your average dot-com or
mom-and-pap-restaurant creating a website and maintaining it over the
years.

> The difference between it and the contents of other elements
> is that it isn't visually displayed by non-AT user agents, such as
> Safari, Firefox, IE, and Opera.
>
> I digress, though.  To return to the topic of this thread, even when
> @summary isn't displayed in say, Opera, it isn't hidden, because it is
> exposed via JAWS, or other AT device. That's more the point I'm trying
> to make: summary isn't 'hidden', it's just targeted to a specific
> subset of the user community.

I still think it is hidden unless the person is using an AT tool, or
unless they specifically go look for outdated summaries (using DOM,
view-source or through other means). Hence "hidden" rather than
"impossible to access", you need to actively search for it in order to
see it.

This is all a game of numbers. Yes, it's technically possible for
authors and QA to go find the summary using any of the means that you
have mentioned. But very few people will.

/ Jonas

Received on Wednesday, 1 July 2009 20:30:54 UTC