- From: Matthew Turvey <mcturvey@gmail.com>
- Date: Thu, 2 Feb 2012 19:25:30 +0000
- To: Benjamin Hawkes-Lewis <bhawkeslewis@googlemail.com>
- Cc: John Foliot <john@foliot.ca>, Leif Halvard Silli <xn--mlform-iua@xn--mlform-iua.no>, Silvia Pfeiffer <silviapfeiffer1@gmail.com>, Laura Carlson <laura.lee.carlson@gmail.com>, Sam Ruby <rubys@intertwingly.net>, Paul Cotton <Paul.Cotton@microsoft.com>, Maciej Stachowiak <mjs@apple.com>, HTML WG <public-html@w3.org>
On 31 January 2012 23:39, Benjamin Hawkes-Lewis
<bhawkeslewis@googlemail.com> wrote:
> On Tue, Jan 31, 2012 at 10:05 AM, Matthew Turvey <mcturvey@gmail.com> wrote:
>> Removing the HTML-A11Y-TF's "no visual encumbrance" and "no default
>> indicator" constraints would certainly improve perceivability for
>> sighted users, and the range of authoring options available :)
>
> You can have reasonably discoverable secondary actions without
> relaxing these constraints:
I think opinions may differ on at what point something becomes
unreasonably discoverable, especially for non-technical users :)
> - Hint secondary actions on hover, for example with an icon over
> the image control. iCab provides such hints with @longdesc.
>
> - Expose the secondary action in the context menu. Opera provides
> this for @longdesc.
I don't think it's easy or intuitive for sighted users to determine
that a special icon or mouse cursor means they should do something
like activate a context menu and locate an entry called "long
description". In my opinion your points about the problems opaque and
non-intuitive indicators on image maps present to people with partial
sight or learning disabilities apply here too.
> - Perhaps best of all, give the user an explicit choice of actions
> when they focus, hover, or activate the image control, for example by
> popping up a menu with two options "{Link text}" and "Long
> description". This UI pattern is familiar from mobile interfaces,
> where (for example) when you sharing a link you can choose which
> sharing service to use.
>
> Such UI patterns could be reused in other cases of multiple links, for
> example, when @href and @cite conflict. Note that HTML5 says "User
> agents should allow users to follow such citation links."
>
> It's a lot easier for UAs to provide this sort of progressive
> disclosure based on declarative markup like @longdesc and @cite than
> on mystery meat image maps.
I think this is more an argument for a generalised solution for
putting multiple links (or commands) on any element.
For example, your previous email outlined a scenario where an author
may want to put an image description link and a big raw JPG link on an
image. In this case, a longdesc could provide context menu access to
the image description. But another author may think it makes more
sense to put the image description as the normal link, and a link to
the raw JPG (or links to several different JPG sizes) on the context
menu. Is there anything we need to add to HTML5 to support this
general use case?
-Matt
Received on Thursday, 2 February 2012 19:25:57 UTC