- From: Jonas Sicking <jonas@sicking.cc>
- Date: Tue, 5 Jan 2010 23:38:13 -0800
- To: Denis Boudreau <dboudreau@webconforme.com>
- Cc: HTML Accessibility Task Force <public-html-a11y@w3.org>, HTML WG Public List <public-html@w3.org>
On Tue, Jan 5, 2010 at 10:48 PM, Denis Boudreau <dboudreau@webconforme.com> wrote: > On 2010-01-05, at 6:24 PM, Ian Hickson wrote: > > Nobody is suggesting making tables less accessible. The proposal in the > spec is to make pages _more_ accessible by transitioning from using > summary="" to using a variety of more effective techniques. > > I agree. But nobody has suggested otherwise. > Some people believe @summary needs to be replaced by something better > because it's not used properly, it's technologically outdated, no geeky > enough, whatever. > Others think that we should simply do a little more education and outreach > so authors finally learn to use it properly. We've pulled stunts like that > before on much more complicated stuff. > Why couldn't we fix what's broken instead of reinventing a wheel that a lot > of AT users won't be able to benefit from because they'll remain stuck with > their old AT versions that won't support all this new "variety of more > effective techniques"? The question should never be why not to have a feature, but why to have it. So my question is why should we have @summary in the spec? As far as I can tell all the problems that @summary aimed to solve, are already solved by aria-describedby. And solved better than @summary does. If you think you could successfully evangelize @summary to be used, why not instead spend that effort to evangelize aria-describedby? And my understanding is that most AT tools are working on implementing aria. Firefox already supports it. Don't know what the state is in other browsers. So it seems likely that tool support is the smaller problem here. / Jonas
Received on Wednesday, 6 January 2010 07:39:07 UTC