- From: Joe D Williams <joedwil@earthlink.net>
- Date: Tue, 4 Aug 2009 14:43:30 -0700
- To: "Leif Halvard Silli" <lhs@malform.no>, "John Foliot" <jfoliot@stanford.edu>
- Cc: "'Maciej Stachowiak'" <mjs@apple.com>, "'HTML WG'" <public-html@w3.org>, <po@trace.wisc.edu>, <lorettaguarino@google.com>
> I wonder whether, according to you - as soon as the summary is > visible to all - sighted and unsighted, it isn't necessary to > identify it as a summary anymore? Hi Leif, Sorry if I am not the actual you being addressed in the above. A big point of this is that the author must see @summary as holding something that is specifically aimed at some assistive or accessibility functionality that is not defined or at this time even definable by the W3C HTML 5 web browser all by itself. That is, at this time, the W3C HTML browser has no way of knowing what will be done with that @summary content; all browser knows is that it is probably text that may be grabbed by an essentially external context. Hopefully the @summary content adds to the usefullness of the table in that context, All browser needs to know is that the author wanted to provide some kind of alternative content for an interface probably known in detail only to the author, tool producer, and end user of the add-on technology. but the point about identity is just that there are two somewhat parallel authoring paths. Of course it is expected that the visible page rendering would have enough supporting information in the surrounding content to get users to understand and use the table for its designed purpose. The old @summary is not intended to replace that support. Instead @summary is a different authoring path. It provides a container for alternative content that is only provided upon request of the assistive agent. This is one reason why @summary may not be sufficient by itself. In order to keep it challenging for authors, I think it should be highly recommended that the same stuff does not appear both in the related describing/using the table info aimed at the typical user in the mainline, and also in @summary aimed at some possibly unknown alternative interface. Thanks Again and Best Regards, Joe'
Received on Tuesday, 4 August 2009 21:44:22 UTC