RE: New @roles for media descriptions, etc. (was RE: Agenda: HTML-A11Y Media Subteam on 25 May at 21:30Z for 90 Minutes)

Richard Schwerdtfeger wrote:
>
> So, what happens today is that the descriptions are glued
> together to form a single description when presented to a
> screen reader.

This is what I suspected, and this is far from optimum. We *might* be able
to address this with CSS3 Speech, and pause-after
(http://www.w3.org/TR/css3-speech/#pause-props), although we need the SR's
to wake up and smell the coffee here and start doing something with audio
CSS.

>
> If we would like to separate them semantically as you are
> suggesting we would need to separate them in the accessibility
> API. Right now we make no distinction about what the object is
> describing it if we are glueing them together and we would need
> to make the AT aware that the describing object has semantic
> meaning. ... All doable of course it just requires us to provide
> AT vendor education.

Well, ya, that's where I am heading. The question is, would @role be the
right mechanism to do this by? I believe so, but am looking for
confirmation (and if yes, suggest adding it to the list for ARIA.next)

I agree however that this scheme requires a fair number of players to
coordinate to get it right. As Steve Faulkner noted to Silvia Pfeiffer
earlier today, right now it's the browsers that are flattening out the
aria-describedby text, which would break the possibility of this solution
from being viable (in terms of solving i18n issues or for linking to a
longer textual description), so we need to educate the browsers to not do
that. Then we need to help AT understand what we are seeking to do and get
them on board, and finally we need to teach page authors how to do this
correctly. So, ya, a big job, but one worth going after IMHO.

JF

Received on Thursday, 26 May 2011 22:35:43 UTC