- From: Jonas Sicking <jonas@sicking.cc>
- Date: Wed, 1 Jul 2009 12:14:48 -0700
- To: Shelley Powers <shelley.just@gmail.com>
- Cc: HTMLWG WG <public-html@w3.org>
On Wed, Jul 1, 2009 at 8:15 AM, Shelley Powers<shelley.just@gmail.com> wrote: > One thing I think we need to be careful about when discussing > accessibility markup, as well as semantic metadata, is that nothing is > really hidden. > > I've noticed others use the adjective, and I also recently used this > term when referring to @summary. However, in all of the contexts in > which we are using the term, we are using it incorrectly. > > Everything in a web page is visible to someone at some time, unless > deliberately obfuscated and/or encrypted. For instance, @summary may > not be visible to those who are not using AT, but it is visible to > those who are. I *think* that it's meant in the sense that these features are hidden to the person authoring the page. And to the people "QA-ing" the page. So for example the author of the page is not using AT tools, it doesn't help him/her, in the process of authoring the page, that AT tools exposes @summary. Similarly, if the person testing the page before it us published doesn't use AT tools, he or she will not see any wrong values in the @summary attribute. > And it's visible to anyone looking into page source, or > to the author, who adds it to the page, or via any number of other > tools and technologies. Indeed, if the author creates the page using a simple text editor then @summary is quite visible. This is not the case if the author is using a tool like adobe dreamweaver. I think that it's very interesting to look at the differences between <img alt> and <table summary>. There are two important differences between them. First of all alt was a required attribute in HTML 4, so people validating their pages got an error if no @alt was included. Second, and I believe just as importantly, for a very long time (maybe still?) IE used to display the @alt attribute as a tooltip (if no @title attribute was present). That meant that the @alt attribute was somewhat visible to everyone. Even people without AT-tools. This lead to outdated or flat out wrong @alt values would be more likely to be detected pretty quickly and fixed. However, if there is a need, as I think has been claimed (correct me if I'm wrong), for a summary that is dedicated specifically to non-sighted people, and so showing it in any form to sighted people defeats its purpose, then things are different. / Jonas
Received on Wednesday, 1 July 2009 19:15:54 UTC