Re: Issues of @summary and use of data for "decisions"

On 2009-06-23 Simon Pieters <simonp@opera.com> wrote:

>On Wed, 24 Jun 2009 01:50:00 +0200, Steve Axthelm <steveax@pobox.com> wrote:
>>
>>I disagree. Rolling summary into caption reduces options for 
>>both page authors and for users of AT.
>
>It doesn't seem like a great loss to me, but I might be wrong.
>
>
>>As a developer, perhaps a developer who knows the preferences 
>>of users of AT that frequent my site,
>
>Seems like a pretty uncommon event...

You might be surprised.

>>having summary separate from caption gives me flexibility in 
>>the way I present information about tables.
>
>How would you use this flexibility?

As John Foliot noted earlier today [1], visual designers often 
object to information targeted at AT (viz: making focus 
invisible). Summary currently is not visible to non-AT users. As 
a developer that cares about accessibility, but does not get 
final say for page content or look (which I suspect is pretty 
common, at least the final say part), I can add summary and help 
my users out without waging a fight that I will almost certainly lose.

Yes, css trickery could do _some_ of this (see below), but why?

>>I would submit that AT users also benefit from having them 
>>separate as it affords them more granularity in user settings.
>
>What settings?

Screen readers are amazingly deep applications that allow for 
much customization.

Window Eyes for instance has verbosity settings for table 
elements & attributes that includes summary [2]. I had thought 
that Jaws did as well, but a quick poke into the configuration 
manager [3] didn't turn the summary attribute up (I'm far from 
an expert user so I certainly could have missed it.) Perhaps 
that dialog will give you an idea of the level of customization 
possible though.

Regards,

-Steve

[1] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-html/2009Jun/0633.html
[2] https://gwmicro.com/Window-Eyes/Manual/HTML/index.html?19_14tables.htm
[3] http://pangram.org/w3/jfw10-config.png

Received on Wednesday, 24 June 2009 00:55:48 UTC