Re: 48-Hour Consensus Call: InstateLongdesc CP Update

On Tue, Sep 25, 2012 at 3:03 PM, John Foliot <john@foliot.ca> wrote:
> Silvia Pfeiffer wrote:
>>
>> I've seen it and I've bought into this argument before, but Web
>> developers don't want their browsers to put visual aids on their
>> images (they can do that themselves)
>
> Actually, that is not 100% correct. Authors don't want to have to place
> those visual aids on the web-content themselves. We learned this in the late
> 90's, when the current Best Practice was to include a "d link" on screen.
> Authors ran from that screaming in pain.
>
> However, most professional web developers both understand and embrace the
> idea that if the end user needs or wants to make changes to their visual
> design to better improve their individual interaction, then they accept
> that. They accept scalable fonts, they accept elastic design for various
> view-ports and screen resolutions (and in fact are now developing with that
> concept in mind), they accept user style sheets, and high-contrast mode.
>
> There are already a number of tools that add visible markers to the screen
> on user-demand, including at least one Firefox Plugin (Mouseless browsing),
> and Dragon Naturally Speaking (both which allow users to enumerate links, so
> that if they have 5 "Read More" links, they can more precisely speak the
> go-to command as "click link #4").
>
> If this were a user-agent setting that users could set in their preferences
> (just like they can today specify to always use Helvetica at 22 pts, if they
> so choose) then this would be, I suspect, non-controversial to most content
> authors.

You're certainly not going to get that for @longdesc, because there is
existing use. Just imagine those top Web sites that Steve's collection
included would suddenly all have an (i) on top of their images in
browsers. I'm sure they wouldn't be impressed.

It could certainly be an idea to experiment with this with a new
attribute before it goes into any specs.

Regards,
Silvia.

Received on Tuesday, 25 September 2012 05:23:48 UTC