Re: Response to: ChangeProposals/DeprecateLongdesc

On 2011-08-23, at 6:31 PM, Janina Sajka wrote:

> 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.

As a screen-reader user my first response was to agree with Silvia. I * never * use continuous reading on a web page, I rarely use continuous reading in any document.  However, I do recognize that continuous reading is used by some screen-reader users.

If I were to run into a long description that bored me I would likely (JAWS):

1. press the down arrow key a couple of times until I was past the description and then resume continuous reading, or

2. Press the read next paragraph key combination and then, presuming I was past the description, resume continuous reading.

However, I would never be quite sure that I had actually finished w/ the long description, and that I wasn't skipping to far and missing important or potentially interesting information.

Thanks,
Everett

Received on Tuesday, 23 August 2011 22:50:41 UTC