[whatwg] Question regarding accessibility for img

From: "Benjamin Hawkes-Lewis" <bhawkeslewis@googlemail.com>
To: "Geoffrey Sneddon" <foolistbar at googlemail.com>
Cc: "Pentasis" <pentasis at lavabit.com>; <whatwg at lists.whatwg.org>
Sent: Sunday, November 30, 2008 9:56 PM
Subject: Re: [whatwg] Question regarding accessibility for img


> Geoffrey Sneddon wrote:
>>
>> On 30 Nov 2008, at 16:40, Pentasis wrote:
>>
>>> I notice that it says in the spec under the img-section:
>>>
>>> "There has been some suggestion that the longdesc attribute from HTML4, 
>>> or some other mechanism that is more powerful than alt="", should be 
>>> included. This has not yet been considered."
>>>
>>> May I ask why it has not been considered (yet)?
>>
>> Because there's an issues list of several thousand issues, and as such 
>> not all issues have been considered. If we could do everything at once 
>> we'd have a spec instantly. :)
>
> Perhaps also worth noting that there's already been a quite epic amount of 
> discussion of LONGDESC, if you care to search the archives. I suppose the 
> text might be more accurate if it said "yet been decided".
>
> A rough summary of the currently dominant view in WHATWG would be that 
> visible descriptions are more useful than invisible descriptions and that 
> in any case LONGDESC is poisoned by real-world abuse ( 
> http://blog.whatwg.org/the-longdesc-lottery ).
>
> --
> Benjamin Hawkes-Lewis

Just a random thought (not a major discussion point afaic):
As I understand it, "best-practice" would now dictate that the image is 
simply explained in the actual content. I agree with this on the most part, 
but I can image the explanation and the image being seperated in "distance" 
from each other. Would it be helpfull for screenreaders to include a 
anchor-point on the image that points towards the explanatory text in such 
cases (which COULD be done with the longdesc), or would you think that be 
overkill?

Bert

Received on Monday, 1 December 2008 00:28:56 UTC