- From: James Craig <jcraig@apple.com>
- Date: Fri, 5 Sep 2008 19:56:59 -0700
- To: Justin James <j_james@mindspring.com>
- Cc: public-html@w3.org, W3C WAI-XTECH <wai-xtech@w3.org>
Justin James wrote: > James Craig wrote: >> 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. I would call it "equivalent," rather than "identical" functionality, since longdesc is intended to be an external resource, and aria- describedby is intended to be internal resource. For example, a DIV representing an image could be marked to indicate that the caption text is its long description: <div role="img" aria-labelledby="myImage" aria-describedby="myCaption"> <img id="myImage" src="img.png" alt="Chart showing Candidate X's 12% lead." … /> <p id="myCaption"> Chart shows the breakdown of counties supporting Candidate X and Candidate Y. Candidate X is leading in all but three counties, with a 12% lead overall. </p> </div> That said, there is nothing to stop you using it in a similar way to longdesc, where aria-describedby would pointed to a link that referenced an external file. It'd be interesting to see if browsers and AT supported using it in this way though. <div role="img" aria-labelledby="myImage" aria- describedby="myLongDescription"> <img id="myImage" src="img.png" alt="Chart showing Candidate X's 12% lead." … /> <a id="myLongDescription" href="fullData.html" rel="longdesc"> Spreadsheet including full data set referenced in this chart. </a> </div> Cheers, James
Received on Saturday, 6 September 2008 02:57:43 UTC