- From: Silvia Pfeiffer <silviapfeiffer1@gmail.com>
- Date: Wed, 24 Aug 2011 14:57:14 +1000
- To: public-html-a11y@w3.org
Janina, I have a quick question: in the document that you pointed out, @aria-describedby is listed under long descriptions. The explanation for long descriptions in turn states that they are explicitly meant for user-initiated reading only. So, now I wonder why @aria-describedby has been implemented as a mechanism that is not user-initiated? Would that maybe be a browser bug? Thanks for helping me understand. Cheers, Silvia. On Wed, Aug 24, 2011 at 8:31 AM, Janina Sajka <janina@rednote.net> 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. 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 Wednesday, 24 August 2011 04:59:09 UTC