Re: Response to: ChangeProposals/DeprecateLongdesc

On Wed, Aug 24, 2011 at 8:49 AM, E.J. Zufelt <everett@zufelt.ca> wrote:
> 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.


That is indeed the interaction that I meant and IIUC what Janina
termed "Escapable Structure".

Janina: I don't quite follow why what I suggested is a problem. Are
you taking the view of a person that is not interacting with the page
and therefore cannot press a button to go to the next element to be
read out? The way I see it is:

with @aria-describedby the screenreader will start reading out the
long description to you and you have to actively interrupt it and move
on if you don't want it.

in contrast, with @longdesc the screenreader mentions that a long
description is available and you have to actively press a button to
get it read out if you want it, then press another button to move on.

>From where I stand, they are two different means of interacting and
some people may prefer one over the other. I cannot in general say
though that one is better than the other. They both have their merits.

Where am I wrong?

Thanks for helping me understand.

Cheers,
Silvia.

Received on Wednesday, 24 August 2011 00:57:28 UTC