Re: Longdesc change proposal update

Laura Carlson, Sun, 8 May 2011 04:47:05 -0500:
> Hi Silvia,
> 
>> I'm saying that since it could be a good recommendation to add.
> 
> I'm open to it. If people agree,

I agree. It is something authors MAY do. Not sure if there should feel 
that they SHOULD do and at least there should be no MUST to do so.

One advantage of doing so is that the description itself stands out as 
"visible meta data". A "loose" page with just plain text becomes very 
dull - I think that a company would like to have their logo and other 
things that make the page meaningful to look at, standalone.

> what spec text would you propose adding to:
> http://www.d.umn.edu/~lcarlson/research/ld-spec-text2.html

[In this round, I'll just comment Silvia's idea.]

Silvia's idea:

>>> I would only recommend that the page
>>> that the longdesc points to includes the image itself and a pointer
>>> back to the page(s) that it lives on, so as to make it a proper part
>>> of the web surfing experience.
>> 
>> It might help. Authors can do that. Not many do.
> 
> I'm saying that since it could be a good recommendation to add. Then
> it's almost like the pages that Wikipedia has for their uploaded
> images, which basically only have the picture and the description that
> the upload user has provided, e.g.
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Curitiba_10_2006_05_RIT.jpg. It
> would make such pages much more useful if they had a proper long
> description.

Regarding the Wikipedia example: That image is used e.g. in Wikipedia's 
Accessibility article. [1] And it is there the @longdesc could have 
been used.  Let us consider that Wikipedia removed their explicit 
anchor element around that image in the Accessibility article:

One advantage of doing so is that VoiceOver would then announce it as 
an image. Currently it just announces that it is a link. (This came as 
a surprise to VoiceOver developer James Craig, recently - so may be not 
as it should be?) 

But regardless of whether the link was removed, a @longdesc could link 
to the specific subsection of Wikipedia's 'About this image" page. 
Namely it could point to the section where the image is described. If 
there is one.  But would it be right to let the longdesc point to the 
entire page? That I am not so certain about. I don't think no, because 
Wikipedia's about pages contains lots of irrelevant info.

Btw, I have suggested (spec text which says) that when a longdesc 
points to another page, then it should point to the exact fragment 
where the description begins ... And that there should also be an 
onvous end of the description. I still think that is a good idea May 
be, Silvia, if you try to add spec text, should should try to keep that 
perspective? I think, btw, that if the longdesc description is kept 
inside a <figure> element, then we basically fulfill both your idea and 
mine idea. (Provided that the <figure> provides a description and not 
all the a11y-irrelevant license stuff etc that Wikipedia has.)

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accessibility
-- 
Leif H Silli

Received on Sunday, 8 May 2011 11:58:43 UTC