Re: CP, ISSUE-30: Link longdesc to role of img [Was: hypothetical question on longdesc]

On Fri, Mar 23, 2012 at 9:34 PM, Léonie Watson <lwatson@nomensa.com> wrote:
> Silvia Pfeiffer wrote:
> "When you see an image at the start of the video, you do not know if it's the first frame of the video, the n-the frame of the video, or a jpg being pulled in as a placeholder for a frame of the video. It can be any of these three. Therefore, since we agree that what matters is the UI and how it functions in the UI, there is no distinction between a paused frame and the poster. Therefore, from a logical and UI point of view, the jpg is indeed part of the video and its genesis does not matter."
>
>        It's genesis may not matter, but its content does. As a screen reader user, I would like to know what that image contains. I'd also like to know what the movie contains.

Yes, I appreciate that. I don't think there is any dispute of that.
I'm just saying that since we don't know what frame the author *or
browser* chooses to represent the video - of the thousands of frames
that a video contains (or in fact any image) - the frame is only that:
a frame representing a short glimpse of the video. Therefore, there is
no semantic difference between what the video contains and what the
image contains: you can in fact identify the video with the long
textual description and the image with the short textual description.

Now, my solution for the short textual description of a video was
@aria-label. If that is indeed not possible (like John seems to argue,
though I am not fully sold on that argument), another means could be
to put an @alt on it. Or whatever else you want to call the short text
alternative.

The core of my argument is that the short text alternative for the
video is indeed the description of the poster - they are one and the
same. If anything, the short textual description should include more
information than the image, but never less.


>        Whether the image is the cinema poster, a still from the video, the film company's ident, or something else entirely, I'd like to enjoy it. This shouldn't be confused with wanting to know what's in the video, anymore than you'd confuse looking at a poster on a cinema wall with reading a promotional description of the movie, or watching the movie itself.

Any of these examples are also just a hint to what the video is about.
Indeed, they will tell you less about the video than an actual short
text alternative of the video should. For example, for movies, the
short text alternative of the poster is most of the time just the
title of the poster, e.g. [1] - that would work very well also for the
video itself. In fact, in the example at [1] I would suggest that a
more adequate short text alternative for the video would be the one
sentence that summarizes the video on that page. It says everything
and more than the picture that is on the poster, which is indeed a
young woman in some kind of fire archery. Note, however, that this
information isn't provided for the image in the image's short text
alternative either. It would be if there was a long description - but
then again that information would be far less that what would be
available in a long description of the video.

Regards,
Silvia.

[1] see an example at http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1392170/

Received on Saturday, 24 March 2012 02:08:25 UTC