Re: Caption@title instead of table@summary?

Steve Axthelm 2009-02-20 21.21:
> On 2009-02-18 Joshue O Connor <joshue.oconnor@cfit.ie> wrote:
> 
>> 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.
> 
> Indeed, let me provide a real world example:
> 
> <http://www.bookshare.org/search?resultsView=TABLE&search=Search&keyword=king> 
> 
> We implemented sortable headings for these search results tables. A 
> sighted user gets visual cues about the sorting via the heading colors 
> and sort direction icon. We felt like this was important information to 
> all users and chose to expose that through @summary:
> 
> summary="Search results sorted by title, ascending"

This a good example.

But some might wonder why, in this particular case, that text 
could not go directly inside the <caption> element together with 
@media screen{caption{display:none}} ?  After all, @summary is for 
non-screen media? Do we, in this particular case, need @summary 
because JAWS and other screen readers doesn't see it if the Web 
browser doesn't see it?

> Caption@title does not provide the same flexibility in authoring that 
> having both Caption and Summary available does. 

Caption@title has roughly the same flexibility IMHO. And like 
@summary, it does not require CSS. But UAs looks for @summary. 
That's the real "problem".

>The exclusion of  @summary would be a big loss IMHO.

What HTML 5 says about <caption> is, in my view, not enough, 
regardless. HTML 5 should recognise the problem that @summary is 
supposed to solve and prescribe ways to solve it.

It is when one has allread used <caption> for something else, or 
when the summary info is longer than what is fit for a caption, 
that one really needs @summary.
-- 
leif halvard silli

Received on Saturday, 21 February 2009 02:45:04 UTC