Re: Nothing is really hidden

On Thu, Jul 2, 2009 at 6:10 AM, Shelley Powers<shelley.just@gmail.com> wrote:
>>> To return to my point, and sorry if I seem to be belaboring it: I
>>> think that the use of 'hidden' for certain elements and attributes
>>> could negatively impact on how they are perceived, or valued. I think
>>> its important to look at these values (and that includes semantic
>>> markup, not just accessibility markup) as targeted to a different
>>> subset of users, rather than just define them, generally, as 'hidden'.
>>
>> What I read into 'hidden' is that it's less likely that people will
>> use it at all, and even less likely that they'll use it correctly.
>> Hence it will probably help users that rely on it less.
>>
>
> But then we keep going back into what this thread was about, the data
> really isn't hidden. The values are exposed, but just not specifically
> in one set of user agents, and not specifically for all people. The
> data isn't being exposed to everyone, not because the data is being
> denied, but because not all people will benefit from the data, or be
> interested in it.

If the term is called 'hidden', or 'in reality seen by very few'
matters little to me. Ultimately what matters is that very few
authors/QAs do look at it, and that the result of that is that the
data is often out of date or unhelpful.

You stated in another reply in this thread that recent court rulings
might make people pay attention to accessibility more in the future. I
don't think that will happen. Possibly a few governmental websites
will be authored such that they are accessible, but on the whole I
don't think courts are going to affect the behavior of the masses.

I don't have data to back this up though. So unless someone else does,
we'll simply have to wait 10 more years and see.

I would strongly prefer that we build solutions that fall into what I
referred to as category two solutions. I.e. solutions where we don't
have to rely on authors specifically authoring for AT users. Someone
brought up in a separate thread if it's possible for UAs to auto
generate a summary. That sounds like a very interesting idea to me. If
we can make something like that possible, then I believe we've helped
AT users orders of magnitude more than if we simply stick @summary on
<table> again.

If that is not possible, then I'm much more interested in a solution
like ARIA which is a more comprehensive category 1 solution, rather
than the one-off that @summary and @longdesc is. I don't know if
there's a reason to think that ARIA will work better than @summary
has, but at least I'd imagine it will help make a small set of sites
AT friendly (where authors do in fact author for AT users). Which is
better than nothing.

/ Jonas

Received on Thursday, 2 July 2009 16:27:54 UTC