- From: James Craig <jcraig@apple.com>
- Date: Fri, 5 Sep 2008 13:56:00 -0700
- To: John Foliot <foliot@wats.ca>
- Cc: 'Lachlan Hunt' <lachlan.hunt@lachy.id.au>, public-html@w3.org, 'W3C WAI-XTECH' <wai-xtech@w3.org>
John Foliot wrote: > First off, many users of AT today do not query for longdesc as it is > rarely > if ever provided - a chicken and egg problem accelerated by the fact > that > most (all?) browsers today still do not natively support this > element, and > support within the major AT tools in the marketplace has only recently > emerged. I'd disagree with you on the usefulness of longdesc as a standard description mechanism. There is a better, in-document alternative now: ARIA's describedby property, which is also implemented in more browsers than longdesc. > While these examples have some problems (my friends at Apple have > issues > with a flash based player and Voiceover, and of course these do not > work in > the iPhone), but the *idea* I believe is worth exploring as a > starting point > for the type of functionality that HTML 5 should afford natively. You could achieve the same thing by using the 'rel' attribute on a link, and it would have the added benefit of providing that link to all users, not just the power users of a few AT products. Overloading longdesc is a creative workaround to the inaccessibility of the Flash Player on Mac, but a better long-term solution is to hound Adobe to make the player accessible. James
Received on Friday, 5 September 2008 20:56:43 UTC