- From: Charles McCathie Nevile <chaals@yandex-team.ru>
- Date: Fri, 21 Sep 2012 16:03:54 +0200
- To: "public-html-a11y@w3.org" <public-html-a11y@w3.org>
TL;DR: I believe the "longdesc lottery" conclusion that a lot of longdescs were hopelessly bad, and that longdesc is often terrible in top-X sites. It roughly matches my research (and my expectations). I expect serious careful research to show things getting better. I do not believe that data justifies the conclusion "so longdesc is broken and should be removed". (NB I wrote some years ago about the difference between implementations being bad, and being harmful. That still applies, although I don't have a reference right now). because... I looked at some statistics about a year after the "longdesc lottery" post - analysing content collected by Opera. my conclusion was that the picture was far better than outlined by Mark... probably as much as twice as good. I believe that is well within the margin of error for this kind of research (that margin is likely to be massive), so I don't think we've shown anything very interesting. Without a careful qualitative look at the actual content covered by Steve's results, I am not terribly worried by them. Longdesc is not necessary for a lot of web content, and for a lot of content its benefit is so marginal that people are unlikely to bother doing it even if they are true believers. And most developers are apparently not true believers, don't *test* the long descriptions they make. Steve showed there is no apparent relationship between how popular a site is among a global community who generally have nothing to gain from longdesc, and whether there is good quality longdesc. I don't find that result surprising - nor do I find it tells us anything new or decisive. I note 15 years ago when I began working seriously in accessibility, the alt attribute was something people generally thought was unreasonable, couldn't be done, was almost always missing, and when it was present it was almost always done so badly as to be a waste of time. I would characterise the situation now as about 10 times as good - maybe a majority of people accept it as a good idea, it is often present, and in many cases it isn't useless (although I honestly doubt that good use of alt has become the statistical norm, the almost 2 decades since it was introduced have seen significant improvement). cheers Chaals -- Charles McCathie Nevile - Consultant (web standards) CTO Office, Yandex chaals@yandex-team.ru Find more at http://yandex.com
Received on Friday, 21 September 2012 14:04:30 UTC