- From: Ian Hickson <ian@hixie.ch>
- Date: Tue, 1 Dec 2009 20:40:14 +0000 (UTC)
- To: Cynthia Shelly <cyns@microsoft.com>
- Cc: HTML Accessibility Task Force <public-html-a11y@w3.org>
On Tue, 1 Dec 2009, Cynthia Shelly wrote: > > Can we please put this on the agenda for 12/10? I have a prior > engagement this week, so I won't be able to discuss it on 12/3. > > http://www.w3.org/WAI/PF/HTML/wiki/Summary_Change_Proposal_Nov_18%2C_2009 I'm a little uncomfortable with this change proposal. Specifically, I feel two of the requests -- adding summary="" and orientation="" -- are actually likely to cause harm to accessibility overall rather than help it. Re summary="": I think it would be better to encourage authors to always provide visible text explaining tables, since this would would be more likely to be correct, and would benefit more users. We've seen that when accessibility information is not visible to authors by default, they tend to screw it up, so having help information only visible to screen readers is unlikely to help accessibility; and we've seen that for the few authors who do provide helpful summary="" text tend to put values in that attribute that would be useful to more than just users of accessibility tools, causing other users to miss out on potentially useful information. Re orientation="": It seems dangerous to have features that are so media-specific, since again, authors are unlikely to use it correctly. It seems better for user agents to use the information that can be derived from the table model to determine whether the table is row-major or column-major. If we keep this in the proposal, we should at least include a few examples of tables where the UA would be unable to accurately determien the right reading direction, especially giving examples of orientaton=vertical. Since I will be unable to attend the call on 12/10, could I request that we discuss this by e-mail instead of on the teleconference? Cheers, -- Ian Hickson U+1047E )\._.,--....,'``. fL http://ln.hixie.ch/ U+263A /, _.. \ _\ ;`._ ,. Things that are impossible just take longer. `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'
Received on Tuesday, 1 December 2009 20:40:45 UTC