[Bug 10455] Mint a describedby attribute for the img element

http://www.w3.org/Bugs/Public/show_bug.cgi?id=10455





--- Comment #73 from Leif Halvard Silli <xn--mlform-iua@xn--mlform-iua.no>  2010-09-02 21:19:45 ---
(In reply to comment #16)
> (In reply to comment #12)

John, 

> This was indeed an early technique that the web accessibility community used in
> the late 90's, most often as an anchor element around 'd' or 'd-link'. The
> 'visual' intrusion of a link associated to an image was an issue then, and so
> we had a situation where authors created 'invisible' (actually hidden) d-links
> that were targeted to screen reading technology. The use of d-links was
> deprecated in favor of using longdesc with the release of WCAG 1.
> (http://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG10-TECHS/#def-d-link /
> http://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG10-HTML-TECHS/#img-dlink-invis) 

There is no deprecation. WCAG 2 includes D-links too. Though they are no
referred to as 'description links' and they have also  jumped away from usign
that visible (or even hidden) "D".  Take a look at WCAG technique G73:

http://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG20-HTML-TECHS/G73.html#G73-description

> There is no indication that we will not see a return to this type of behaviour:
> in fact, as examples from the wild show us, the hiding technique is alive and
> well, but now uses CSS to place the link off-screen. As a result, these types
> of techniques then impact on requirement 2:

G73 suggests hiding the description by wrapping an invisible (1px wide) <img>
in a link - I wonder which ARIA @role to use on that <img> ...
G73 also suggest using the caption as a caption element and descriibing the
purpose of the link in the @title attribute. 
(But according to Steve, screenreader users don't use the @title attribute -
http://www.paciellogroup.com/resources/articles/WE05/forms.html.)

> " 2. A way to inform users and authors that a description is present/available
> via user agent ... a way to inform users
> of a link to a longer description that exposes this fact to both sighted and
> non-sighted users."

Indeed. Therefore I don't understand why you don't come out in support of
@rel="longdesc". As G73 makes clear: *even* when one can use a visible link (as
a caption), there is still necessary to make clear that that it is a link to a
long description.

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Received on Thursday, 2 September 2010 21:19:48 UTC