Re: Revert request

On 3/13/12 3:36 PM, Sam Ruby wrote:
> On 03/13/2012 06:21 PM, Charles Pritchard wrote:
>
> [snipped an excellent reply]
>
>> If aria-describedat had any sort of distinction or additional semantic,
>> it might even point to a different location than the longdesc would.
>> Additionally, redundancy might help readers as they cycle through
>> aria-describedat labeled items.
>
> If an aria-describedAt were to be proposed, you might be asked to 
> provide detail of the use cases that this solves.  But that's putting 
> the cart before the horse.  First we need to clearly establish if 
> there is work on such a proposal, and what such a proposal would include.

The PFWG is outside of my purview: yes, there is work on an ARIA 
semantic with etymological roots in longdesc.
And it will be glorious. And it'll come out of ARIA1.1 or ARIA2. And I'm 
more likely to see it in ARIA2, given that 1.1 will probably be an 
errata-style document covering issues of accessibility that were not 
covered in 1.0. That is, 1.1 will fix things that don't exist. ARIA2 
would further enhance things that do exist.

That's my guesstimate.

In the meantime: where are we with closing the case on HTML5 @longdesc?

I understand there is an active issue to improve aria-describedby via 
changes to @hidden. It's really far out there and even if it worked 
perfectly; which it would spec-wise if implemented between <canvas> 
tags; and even if it were implemented perfectly (canvas isn't; we're 
just now seeing focus events working, and they are bug-ridden); even if 
all of that happened, @longdesc would still have its use.

So we're looking at new aria semantics that would work to supersede 
@longdesc; and as I said in my reply, that's great, but that doesn't 
mean that HTML @longdesc should be deprecated. It simply means it'll 
have an ARIA mapping in the future.


-Charles

Received on Tuesday, 13 March 2012 22:51:48 UTC