RE: Is longdesc a good solution? (was: Acessibility of <audio> and <video>)

> -----Original Message-----
> From: public-html-request@w3.org [mailto:public-html-request@w3.org] On
> Behalf Of James Craig
> Sent: Friday, September 05, 2008 4:56 PM
> To: John Foliot
> Cc: 'Lachlan Hunt'; public-html@w3.org; 'W3C WAI-XTECH'
> Subject: Re: Is longdesc a good solution? (was: Acessibility of <audio>
> and <video>)
> 
> 
> 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.

I'm not an ARIA expert (which is why I didn't consider it for this), but I
*am* an ARIA convert. If ARIA supports identical information as longdesc
does, I am in favor of it over using an attribute, simply because I think
that "people who really care" will be using ARIA, and overall I find the
system practical.

J.Ja

Received on Friday, 5 September 2008 21:16:09 UTC