- From: Robert Burns <rob@robburns.com>
- Date: Sun, 1 Jul 2007 00:25:35 -0500
- To: Lachlan Hunt <lachlan.hunt@lachy.id.au>
- Cc: Sander Tekelenburg <st@isoc.nl>, public-html@w3.org
On Jun 30, 2007, at 11:23 PM, Lachlan Hunt wrote: > > Sander Tekelenburg wrote: >> At 17:36 +0200 UTC, on 2007-06-30, Anne van Kesteren wrote: >>> On Sat, 30 Jun 2007 17:28:58 +0200, Robert Burns >>> <rob@robburns.com> wrote: >>>> That's when fallback content is needed: for non-text media (that is >>>> sometimes serviced through plug-ins). >>> Isn't that a problem with the plugin? >> Can you describe how we can leave the the technique/syntax to >> provide textual >> alternatives up to plugin developers and still comply with our design >> principles' Priority of Constituencies and Universal Access? > > You are incorrectly assuming that a textual alternative is needed > to make content accessible. Try doing some research into how > formats like Flash, PDF and other plugins have incorporated > accessibility features directly in themselves. The term research seems to be used way too often in these discussions as a dismissive remark like: "Try doing some research". I don't know if the chair is bothered by this, but I am. -Its perfectly reasonable that someone thoroughly familiar with flash media's fallback capabilities could still feel HTML needs its own fallback mechanisms. To paraphrase try telling someone using an iPhone how nice the flash fallback content would be if they had a flash plugin.That sounds like the old smug frame fallback messages. Something like: <object src="someflash.swf">If you had flash, you'd know what this object was about</object>. At another point I had suggested we might want to recommend or even require that conforming implementations should expose metadata within image formats such as png, gif, jpeg, etc. That was dismissed because of how difficult it is to write metadata extraction code. Now were told that implementations can simply extract metadata from formats that they're not even familiar with and expose that when the plugin is missing. Can we all presume the other parties we're discussing these issues are no simply misinformed, but might have something valuable to say ( I suggested before that this is a necessary precondition to objectivity and I stand by that). Take care, Rob
Received on Sunday, 1 July 2007 05:26:09 UTC