Re: Longdesc change proposal update

On Sun, May 8, 2011 at 9:58 PM, Leif Halvard Silli
<xn--mlform-iua@xn--mlform-iua.no> wrote:
> 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 was indeed wondering about that. If longdesc should only be used for
a11y purposes, then indeed it should point to the fragment offset of
the long description on the longdesc page. However, I wonder if it is
sufficient to provide people the opportunity to read that information
on a separate page that contains other interesting information, too.
They are already prepared to spend more time on reading about the
image, so they will probably find the paragraph(s) that provide the
long description quickly. That would allow the longdesc link to be
both useful to blind and sighted users.

Just my 2c though, not knowing the full background of the longdesc discussion.

Cheers,
Silvia.


> 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 12:18:33 UTC