Re: My final attempt on explanation (was RE: [DRAFT] Heartbeat poll - update 2)

On Mon, 3 Aug 2009, Ian Hickson wrote:
> The argument here is that summary="" is needed because it isn't shown to
> visual-UA users. This has been countered by showing that summaries that
> are useful to non-visual UAs are in fact also useful to users of visual
> UAs,

Actually I thought the case is made that it is structural/spatial
nature of the table that is supposed to be included in @summary:

<table summary="Rows contain destinations, traveling dates, and grand
total. Columns contain expense category and total. The first column
contains merged table cells.">

and that a visual UA user would instantly see the above in the table
itself immediately without a need for the summary.  Why would they
also want to see the example summary text in a caption somewhere?

> and that in addition, having summaries not visible to visual UAs is
> causing authors to fail to write good summaries.

I can understand that, but I don't think caption has been proven as a
mechanism to capture the spatial/structural nature of a table either.
In fact, BECAUSE captions are visible I feel we are less likely to see
authors authoring what they will find as redundant information in
their captions just as Laura has stated:

> Providing it visually would be extra
> verbiage that most authors/designers would be reluctant to include
> visually on a page because of redundancy.

Regards,
Jeff

Received on Tuesday, 4 August 2009 04:31:36 UTC