Re: ISSUE-30 (Longdesc) Change Proposal

On Fri, Oct 30, 2009 at 2:20 PM, Leif Halvard Silli
<xn--mlform-iua@xn--mlform-iua.no> wrote:
> Joshue O Connor On 09-10-30 17.33:
>
>> Jonas Sicking wrote:
>>>
>>> On Fri, Oct 30, 2009 at 9:01 AM, Joshue O Connor <joshue.oconnor@cfit.ie>
>>> wrote:
>>>>>
>>>>> For the cases when rendering the link is not desired, the link can
>>>>> simply be hidden using CSS or the @hidden attribute. Or you can place
>>>>> the link in the <head> which is never rendered.
>>>>
>>>> Again, UAs that would need to find this link, may not be able to do so
>>>> currently. That could be changed as new behaviour could be modeled
>>>> depending on context. Again, this is partially a user agent issue.
>>>
>>> I'm not sure I follow. If the IDREF pointed to the link, why wouldn't
>>> it be able to find it? A simple call to document.getElementById should
>>> do the trick. That wouldn't be affected if the link his hidden or not.
>>> This is what the Firefox implementation of aria-describedby does.
>>
>> Ok, cool.
>
>
> Even cooler:
>
> 1. Using Firefox, go to http://www.cssquirrel.com/comic/
> 2. Point at the comic strip, and bring up the contextual menu.
>   (On the mac, Control-Click on the image)
> 3. Select the Properties in the contextual menu that popped up - as a result
> you get a dialog window listing "Image properties".
>
> At the bottom of the "Image properties" list there is the label
> "Description" which contains the longdesc URI.
>
> But where are the traces of the aria-describedby? It ain't there. Just
> remove the longdesc attribute, and the description field is gone.
> Aria-describedby isn't a property of the image.

This is the feature that is removed from future versions of firefox
(don't remember if it's in 3.6 or 3.7). See discussion in [1] as to
why it was removed (hint: it's not because we hate blind people).

However both aria-describedby and longdesc are still implemented in
the accessibility code, and thus exposed to AT software.

[1] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=513147

/ Jonas

Received on Friday, 30 October 2009 21:52:37 UTC