RE: Action-1734, Action-1708, Action-1709: Proposal for a Figure Role

On Mon, 30 Nov 2015, John Foliot wrote:

> The problem I see here is that we may now have 2 types of Accessible Description: one a brief encapsulation of the image (with text shown to all) and a second type, (here of a true description of the scene as seen by a sighted user,) which may or may not be visually present on the host page. I am actually in favor of Steve's proposal (introduce a new role of "caption") which would be a more accurate definition of the textual content contained within <figcaption>.

It's actually 3 types of description:

1. Caption, shown to all

2. Alt as brief description, reported to screen readers, ideally available to non-screen reader users, Although currently that's only under certain circumstances.

3. Extended description, reported to screen readers as existing, available to screen readers on request, and ideally available to non-screen reader users, in a perfect world.

It's four if you count the dreaded title attribute!

Now, it's true that out in the wild on the web, those 1st 2 are often used interchangeably. Tzviya brought up tumblr, which, regardless of their markup problems, also has a terrible practice that if you upload an image and fill out the text box they call "caption", it puts that text both in a visible caption under the image and in the alt text; A technique guaranteed to annoy screen reader users, and generate wholly useless captions.

But digital publishing, as per the examples provided by Tzviya, is chock-full of well marked up images, because the needs of our customers include having this work done correctly. That's not necessarily true on the open web, but it is very true for the needs of this business sector.

Deborah Kaplan

Received on Monday, 30 November 2015 19:43:46 UTC