Re: LONGDESC: some current problems and a proposed solution added to the wiki

On 1 jul 2007, at 10.28, Lachlan Hunt wrote:

> In the case of Flash, for example, I believe it is possible to make  
> it accessible and there is no need for alternative content to be  
> provided for accessibility reasons.

To the best of my knowledge, Flash can currently only be made  
accessible to users of certain combinations of operating systems  
(Windows only AFAIK) and AT. That may have changed by the time HTML 5  
gets released, if it ever does.

> Although, it may be desirable to provide an alternative HTML  
> version for users who don't have Flash or just really hate using  
> it, those reasons are unrelated to accessibility.

Would you care to expand on that?

> Note that the spec states that "User agents should not show this  
> fallback content to the user."  The fallback in this case is  
> designed for legacy user agents that do not support those elements,  
> so that the author can, for example, either embed the file using  
> <object> or link to the file for the user to download and play  
> separately.

So someone who does not have the plugin installed but is using a  
browser that supports the element used to embed the plugin is out of  
luck?

> Ideally, video would be made accessible by itself.

Yes, but how realistic is that?

/R

Received on Sunday, 1 July 2007 10:56:21 UTC