Re: Discussion: Accessibility Issues Procedure

On Jul 25, 2009, at 9:36 AM, William Loughborough wrote:

> Here's a "concrete proposal". It is terse and clear. It describes  
> what is required to use it and its purpose. It has the further  
> advantage that it is already in place and does not need any  
> rewriting or even further discussion. It is purposely designed to  
> provide a means through which a table is described (via text) for  
> those users for whom the possibility of depiction (via graphics) is  
> meaningless.
>
> summary = text [CS]
> This attribute provides a summary of the table's purpose and  
> structure for user agents rendering to non-visual media such as  
> speech and Braille.

That is a reasonable technical position. In fact, I agree that the  
spec should describe what summary is for better than it currently does.

However, I also think the spec should continue to describe the  
alternate ways of describing a table that it currently does, and  
should recommend describing tables in media-independent markup  
whenever that is practical and sensible.

All told, I think there's not a whole lot of distance between our  
positions on this particular technical issue.

Regards,
Maciej