Re: Call for consensus - longdesc to CR

James Craig <jcraig@apple.com>, 2014-07-25 19:21 -0700:

> As the current editor of the ARIA spec, I added @aria-describedat to the
> ARIA 1.1 working draft because it gathered majority vote in the working
> group, despite my objections and lack of group consensus.
> @aria-describedat has all the same problems as @longdesc, but also breaks
> an established and generally accepted ARIA pattern of not modifying the
> mainstream UI of the host language. Accessibility-conscious user agent
> developers from Mozilla and Google raised similar objections to
> @aria-describedat.

There's something pretty odd about a decision-making process that results
in an intended-for-accessibility feature getting added to a spec over the
objections of the spec's own editor and over the objections of
accessibility-conscious reps/developers from Apple, Mozilla, and Google.

Some might say it's a sign of that decision-making process being pretty
seriously broken and in need of being replaced.

  --Mike

-- 
Michael[tm] Smith http://people.w3.org/mike