- From: Joshue O Connor <joshue.oconnor@cfit.ie>
- Date: Mon, 17 Sep 2012 21:50:12 +0100
- To: John Foliot <john@foliot.ca>
- CC: 'Silvia Pfeiffer' <silviapfeiffer1@gmail.com>, 'Steve Faulkner' <faulkner.steve@gmail.com>, 'HTML Accessibility Task Force' <public-html-a11y@w3.org>
Hi John, J Foliot wrote: > Joshue O Connor wrote: >> So the questions are: >> >> 1) Why did it fail? From the perspective of both the end user >> experience and also browser implementation. [...] > I'll start by asking why you feel it failed from a user-experience? Really John, I only say it has failed because we are at this impasse - my opinions on the user experience are actually immaterial. I won't reiterate them as I want to stay on point about how to move forward. >> 2) What can we do to avoid these failures and improve upon a method to >> support the original use cases that it was designed to accommodate? The >> inception of @longdesc wasn't pulled out of the sky for no good reason. > > In my opinion, the single most critical thing we need today is a commitment > from the browser vendors that they *will* do something to support longer > textual descriptions, and the use-cases that have been brought forward. I think we need to step back further John. We need to work out what it should be before we ask any vendor to implement a solution. They will certainly support some form of long descriptor if it is present in the spec. @longdesc currently has the benefit of some backwards compatibility, and the potential for 'progression'. Anyway, I don't need to tell you that... > I strongly support the work that Steve and Rich have started on with > aria-describedat, but I also worry that without the participation of > engineers from the various browser vendors becoming actively involved, and > banging out an *implementation* solution that address the problems that have > been articulated, that effort will be for naught as well. Right, with all due respect to the work that Steve and Rich are doing it could involve some rather heavy lifting that may be disproportionate to the reward (for both the end user and the vendor). Then I think that they may think that @longdesc is fundamentally flawed and are taking a year zero approach (that the new ARIA spec offers). Cheers Josh
Received on Monday, 17 September 2012 20:50:46 UTC