Re: Another run at grappling with @poster

On Tue, Jun 28, 2011 at 10:29 PM, Philip Jägenstedt <philipj@opera.com> wrote:
> On Thu, 23 Jun 2011 03:32:00 +0200, John Foliot <jfoliot@stanford.edu>
> wrote:
>
>> As we returned to the this issue, Silvia (and I) re-examined the
>> requirements and cooked-up a different approach. It leverages ARIA a
>> little more than the initial suggestion I had, but on paper it looked like
>> it could still solve the larger requirement set. Using the same example,
>> but re-written in this new approach, we would have the following:
>>
>> <h1 id="movieTitle">Gone With The Wind</h1>
>>        <video src="movie.mp4" aria-labeledby="movieTitle"
>> aria-describedby="description poster">
>>                <p id="poster">David O. Selznick's adaptation of Margaret
>> Mitchell's Gone with the Wind. Winner of 10 Academy Awards. A full
>> description of the poster is <a
>> href="file-with-the-rest-of-the-description.html">also available</a>.</p>
>>        </video>
>>
>> <p id="description">American classic in which a manipulative woman and a
>> roguish man carry on a turbulent love affair in the American south during
>> the Civil War and Reconstruction.</p>
>>
>>
>> With this, we have again captured what I believe to be all of the discrete
>> semantics, and while I have some questions about user-experience, I was
>> generally satisfied that for a 'professional' authoring of this by a
>> developer, all of the tools the author needed where there.
>
> IMO, the above is a big improvement, since this solution doesn't concern
> itself with the source of the still image to describe.
>
> There is, however, a problem in putting the description as a child element
> of <video>. It is of course quite convenient since the objective is to
> prevent it from being rendered, but child elements of <video> are explicitly
> "not intended to address accessibility concerns," to quote the spec. It also
> says "User agents should not show this content to the user" which would
> include AT users since "show" is presumably used in an abstract sense.

This is disputable. It is not displayed in a HTML5 browser because it
is meant for fallback for legacy browsers. However, it is in the DOM
and the idea of aria-describedby is to reference sections on the page
that provide accessibility descriptions for the element that has the
aria-describedby attribute with the explicit idea of avoiding
re-authoring. In this case, the content inside the <video> element was
authored for fallback uses, but it would be re-used for accessibility
purposes in an aria-describedby manner. I don't see anything wrong
with that.

> I
> don't really have a strong opinion here, but changing the spec to allow for
> such use is of course an option.

I don't think it's disallowed right now. The way I read it: it's not
clearly forbidden. But I do think we should explicitly allow this to
make it clear.

Cheers,
Silvia.

Received on Tuesday, 28 June 2011 14:49:09 UTC