- From: Laura Carlson <laura.lee.carlson@gmail.com>
- Date: Fri, 25 Mar 2011 20:57:24 -0500
- To: Jonas Sicking <jonas@sicking.cc>
- Cc: Henri Sivonen <hsivonen@iki.fi>, HTMLWG WG <public-html@w3.org>
Hi Jonas, Thank you very much for your email and comments. I really appreciate it. >> What are appropriate way to solve the formal use cases? >> http://www.d.umn.edu/~lcarlson/research/ld.html#uc > > I would love it if we could actually talk about it this way, Me too. > so I'll just take this invitation and run with it. Thank you. > First of all it has always surprised me that the list of use cases > only list discusses adding accessibility information to images. Is > there a reason things like tables, SVG (and portions thereof), figures > and forms are left out? Do you mean that tables, SVG (and portions thereof), figures and forms are left out as they do not have mechanisms for providing a long descriptions? Would it be possible to make longdesc a global attribute? What would be the pros and cons? > Also, ease of use seems to be missing from that page. This isn't > really a use case but rather a requirement. Longdesc is a link so it is simple in that regard. Ease of use and simplicity are pretty evident in the formal use case scenarios. For instance: http://www.d.umn.edu/~lcarlson/research/ld.html#us-01 http://www.d.umn.edu/~lcarlson/research/ld.html#us-02 http://www.d.umn.edu/~lcarlson/research/ld.html#us-07 http://www.d.umn.edu/~lcarlson/research/ld.html#us-08 > However since the page > seems to be lacking a section for requirements maybe it would be ok to > list under use cases. > > Would it be ok for me to go add these requirements to the wiki? Requirements are linked: http://www.w3.org/html/wg/wiki/ChangeProposals/InstateLongdesc#Requirements But I can flesh that out and add ease of use, etc. > Once you include these use cases and requirements it seems much less > that longdesc is a proper solution. > > It's only available on <img>ages > (this missing all other ways even for including images such as > <canvas> and <object>). Yes. Images are what we have been talking about. > It isn't very user friendly. Lots of people > seem to misunderstand it to include the actual describing text rather > than a link to it. That's where better conformance tool and authoring tool checking along with more implementation would come in. > Not only that, but since it is url based, rather > than id based, it encourages people to put the description in an > external resource, which more often than not is not what you want to > do. Being an external resource is very important in many situations. For examples visit: Describing a Logo http://www.d.umn.edu/~lcarlson/research/ld.html#uc-01 Describing an Email Banner http://www.d.umn.edu/~lcarlson/research/ld.html#uc-07 Describing Illustrations http://www.d.umn.edu/~lcarlson/research/ld.html#uc-08 Facilitating etext Image Descriptions Describing etext Images http://www.d.umn.edu/~lcarlson/research/ld.html#uc-09a > It turns out that ARIA already have a attribute that almost fits the > bill, and this is aria-describedby. As is pointed out on the wiki > page, the problem is that the ARIA specification only allows exposing > text content to the user, rather than arbitrary content, such as > links. > > This problem can be fixed though by changing the ARIA specification. > By changing ARIA to say that aria-describedby can point to arbitrary > content, rather than just refer to the textual contents of it, we > solve multiple problems in one go. > > This would first of all allow aria-describedby to solve all the use > cases in the wiki, as well as the ones pointed out in this message. It > also seems to fulfill the ease of use requirement better as people so > far seems to put an id in aria-describedby rather than the actual > text. aria-describedat has been discussed. There are quite a few reasons that it does not seem workable. http://www.w3.org/html/wg/wiki/ChangeProposals/InstateLongdesc#aria-describedat Sean Hayes just wrote up "Configuring Internet Explorer to Handle Longdesc" It adds a context menu entry to extract the longdesc attribute value and have the page navigate to its content. http://blogs.msdn.com/b/accessibility/archive/2011/03/25/configuring-internet-explorer-to-handle-longdesc.aspx Jonas, is something like that doable natively in FireFox? Thanks again. Best Regards, Laura -- Laura L. Carlson
Received on Saturday, 26 March 2011 01:57:56 UTC