- From: Janina Sajka <janina@rednote.net>
- Date: Tue, 23 Aug 2011 18:31:51 -0400
- To: public-html-a11y@w3.org
Silvia Pfeiffer writes: > The problem of aria-describedby automatically starting to read out the > description is not as a big a problem as you make it out to be. Every > screen reader has a key that stops the screen reader from continuing > to read what it is currently reading ... And then what? Are we to abandon reading anything else on the page? If we resume, where do we resume? Right in the middle of that long-description that wasn't so interesting and caused us to stop speech in the first instance? No, Silvia, it won't work that way. This is a problem. It's a problem that has long been resolved, but one that HTML5 seems to want to force on us again. The historic resolution is that we have two mechanisms: 1.) A short stand-in for the graphic/figure which serves to identify it. This is called the alt attribute and is automatically read. 2.) The long text alternative description which provides more detailed information about the image. In HTML4, and in our TF consensud proposal, it's called longdesc, and it's read only when the user requests it be read. Asking for an element/ or attribute to behave both ways, sometimes auto read, sometimes read only upon request, is nonsense because there's simply no reliable way to support both behaviors in the same mechanism. The one subverts the functionality of the other. You can't have it both ways in the same mechanism. Please note we defined this, howbeit tersly, two years ago in: WAI CG Consensus Recommendations on Text alternatives in HTML 5 http://www.w3.org/2009/06/Text-Alternatives-in-HTML5.html PS: What I think you're on the verge of re-inventing is something we called "Escapable Structures" in DAISY. When one begins to read a long "subroutine" of the primary text, perhaps a complex table, one might decide to stop reading that structure and resume reading the primary content, ergo "Escapable Structures." Janina -- Janina Sajka, Phone: +1.443.300.2200 sip:janina@asterisk.rednote.net Chair, Open Accessibility janina@a11y.org Linux Foundation http://a11y.org Chair, Protocols & Formats Web Accessibility Initiative http://www.w3.org/wai/pf World Wide Web Consortium (W3C)
Received on Tuesday, 23 August 2011 22:32:16 UTC