Re: ISSUE 30 @longdesc use cases

On Mon, Aug 23, 2010 at 11:02 AM, John Foliot <jfoliot@stanford.edu> wrote:
> Jonas Sicking wrote:
>>
>> You can even support older UAs which doesn't support the
>> 'hidden' attribute using CSS or simply adding a style="display:none;"
>> attribute.
>
> Hi Jonas,
>
> FYI, both the @hidden attribute and "display:none;" hides content from
> screen-readers as well. Whether or not this is appropriate behaviour for a
> screen reader has been discussed before at great length, but regardless of
> which side of that discussion you come down on, as the browser folk keep
> reminding us, the implementation behaviour is the one that counts today,
> and that's what screen readers do at this time.

I know @hidden and display:none hides content from screen readers when
reading the general flow of the page. However, as I said, code
inspection indicates that it does not prevent the content from being
pointed to by aria-describedby. And my reading of the ARIA
specification indicates that Firefox is correct in this
implementation.

However rather than arguing about what specifications say, the first
order of business should be to check what implementations actually do.
Have you tried using Firefox together with some AT tool that supports
aria-describedby on the example markup I provided? What was the
result, did it:

1. Say that no description for the image was available?
2. Say that an empty description was available?
3. Provide the full description in the paragraph?
4. Something else?

The other thing to remember is that implementations can be changed. If
implementations are to be assumed static, then we should stop writing
specifications and only write documentation.

/ Jonas

Received on Monday, 23 August 2010 18:53:42 UTC