Re: Caption@title instead of table@summary?

Maciej Stachowiak wrote:
> Interesting idea. I think the core tradeoff between <caption title="">
> and <table summary=""> is whether the additional information is
> accessible (in some way) to sighted users. 

No its not. The difference is between some thing that facilitates
comprehension for a user that /needs/ this information and something
that is optional for a user who can already comprenend it. For example,
a sighted user can quickly glance at a table and understand the
relationships between various headers and row and column relationships.
A non sighted user, has to interogate the table. @summary is useful as
it does some of this work for the user because the user is informed in
advance of what the table contains. It could be compared to a look ahead.

>One reason we have both
> title="" and alt="" on <img> is specifically to discourage UAs from
> displaying alt to sighted users, since then it tends to contain
> auxiliary information instead of replacement text. On the other hand, a
> table summary should actually be auxiliary information about the table -
> it doesn't need to fully replace the table because the table is still
> there to be navigated if the user desires.

Yes.

Received on Wednesday, 18 February 2009 11:40:42 UTC