Re: 48-Hour Consensus Call: ARIA-DescribedAT & Longdesc

On 3 April 2012 13:46, Charles McCathieNevile <chaals@opera.com> wrote:
> On Tue, 03 Apr 2012 14:21:53 +0200, Matthew Turvey <mcturvey@gmail.com>

> You appear to have simply ignored what I said about the cases where the link
> is an image, in which case you *can't* do that.

It's unclear what you're referring to here. If you're asking what
authors should do when they want to provide a link to download an
image and a long description, a simple option is to put one link on
the image to a new page, and provide other link(s) on that page.

For example, an image can be linked to a page with the long
description and a larger image on it, and the larger image can link to
a raw image file. Providing the image description on the same page as
the image it is describing is an obvious usability and accessibility
win. In my view, this is exactly the kind of intuitive, common sense,
universal design pattern we want to encourage.

>>> 2. aria-describedby flattens everything to plain text, which is only
>>> suitable for some of the use cases.
>>
>> See http://www.w3.org/WAI/PF/aria-practices/#Descriptions_external
>
> Yes. That's one part of the first point above. aria-describedby is not a
> very suitable mechanism for solving some of the issues that longdesc (and
> the proposed aria-describedat) solves pretty well.

So the two conditions the WAI CG set out for obsoleting longdesc in
HTML5 have been met.

http://www.w3.org/2009/06/Text-Alternatives-in-HTML5

-Matt

Received on Tuesday, 3 April 2012 20:14:05 UTC