[whatwg] Alt attribute for <video> and <audio>

On Fri, Aug 14, 2009 at 3:09 PM, Henri Sivonen<hsivonen at iki.fi> wrote:
> On Aug 14, 2009, at 16:06, Silvia Pfeiffer wrote:
>
>> There is only one thing I can think about that an "alt" attribute
>> could provide that nothing else does: as a blind user tabs onto a
>> video element, the "alt" attribute's content could be read out and
>> briefly describe what is visible in the poster image - or
>> alternatively give a brief summary of the video. This is useful for
>> all those cases where no surrounding text is given for whatever
>> reason. Where a surrounding text is given, such as the video title and
>> description, such text is likely not necessary.
>
>
> I believe aria-label addresses this.

Yes, I think that covers it. This also covers the most important, but
apparently always ignored case: authors who don't have time for
accessibility. A significant portion of web authors will not provide
subtitles for every published video. Nor will they provide links to a
transcript. Even if they care about accessibility, it's just not
economically viable to do it. The best you can hope for is a sentence
or two explaining what the video does.

This also covers other non-text elements: <iframe>, <embed>, <object>.

The only thing left is ARIA's integration with HTML. Have you had
success with your draft? http://hsivonen.iki.fi/aria-html5/ I see you
only had one reply to your first announcement. Will the remaining ARIA
attributes be an explicit part of HTML? Will the "aria-" prefix be
removed?

Remco

Received on Friday, 14 August 2009 07:41:13 UTC