Re: the market hasn't spoken - it hasn't bothered to listened

Smylers wrote:
> Maciej Stachowiak writes:
> 
>>> ... sites that use @longdesc correctly, those that do are likely to 
>>> give due consideration to accessibility ... if someone comes up with 
>>> a brilliant notion that is more likely to be implemented and 
>>> authored, that would also be a win.
>> 
>> Out of the suggestions so far, I like <a rel="longdesc"> the best. It 
>> would do something reasonable in existing UAs, could be applied to 
>> more than just images (videos or tables might merit a long 
>> description for instance)
> 
> <a> elements aren't (currently) nestable, so that would pose problems 
> for, say, table content that includes links.

I don't think anyone was suggesting putting the link around an entire 
table.  The link could be placed after the table, within the caption or 
something.  But I think longdesc would be more useful for images, canvas 
and video (maybe, see below).  That could be handled like this:

<figure>
   <img ...>
   <legend>Caption [<a href="foo" rel="longdesc" title="Long description 
for ...">D</a>]</legend>
</figure>

However, Joe Clark has made some arguments against the use of D-links, 
which should be considered.

http://joeclark.org/book/sashay/serialization/Chapter06.html#d-links

(There is some other good information about long descriptions in that 
document too.)

In regards to using longdesc for videos, that seems like it would 
encourage the use of "full multimedia text alternatives".  Several 
accessibility experts, including Joe Clark, don't approve of such things 
for videos.  Instead, they advocate that videos should be made 
accessibile through the use of things like captions and audio descriptions.

http://www.alistapart.com/articles/tohellwithwcag2#WCAG-documents:CC-DX

-- 
Lachlan Hunt
http://lachy.id.au/

Received on Tuesday, 26 June 2007 17:33:43 UTC