- From: Janina Sajka <janina@rednote.net>
- Date: Fri, 26 Aug 2011 13:57:02 -0400
- To: Silvia Pfeiffer <silviapfeiffer1@gmail.com>
- Cc: John Foliot <jfoliot@stanford.edu>, public-html-a11y@w3.org
Silvia Pfeiffer writes: > > I've long since moved on from discussing @longdesc - for me it's a > matter now of understanding / identifying what @aria-describedby is > actually useful for as a general means for providing long descriptions > to elements. Does it deliver on what it was designed to be? Was the > requirement to remove structure and just present the text a poor > choice, reducing @aria-describedby to sharing all the problems that > @alt has? Is it too late to change that? > John is correct. ARIA-Describedby was not designed "as a general means for providing long descriptions." The document from 2009 I keep pointing to should tip you off to this, that we were looking at a hack when we discussed using it that way. Note that the hack used aria-describedby ONLY to associate a URI somewhere else on screen. The actual long description was to be found on the by accessing the document at that URI, and not as the contents of the aria-describedby. As I think I've previously noted, this had sufficient consensus in WAI to make it into this document. However, that consensus quickly broke down as more and more people looked at it. To my knowledge this is the only time aria-describedby has eevern been proposed, in any way whatsoever, as a mechanism possibly useful to achieve a longer description. Were we to update this document today, this suggestion would undoubtedly be removed. By the way, I believe our 2009 document would be generally reaffirmed, were we to revisit and edit it today. I believe we'd likely change only two things: 1.) remove the describedby based hack for longer descriptions and 2.) refine our acceptance of fig-caption in some way commensurate with the issue raised at http://www.w3.org/Bugs/Public/show_bug.cgi?id=13651. Of course this is my conjecture. Bottom line here is simply this: ARIA-Describedby was NOT intended to facilitate longer descriptions. As john has previously illustrated with example markup, it was designed to associate text elsewhere on page with particular elements, so that critical data could be programatically linked. It does that quite well. Anything else is only on somebody's wish list. Janina > > Cheers, > Silvia. -- 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 Friday, 26 August 2011 17:57:40 UTC