Alternative tables, audio, and video

> 5.3. For tables of text and numbers, provide an alternative page 
> that presents the table information in a linear fashion

I would like to suggest that the guidelines standardize a way of providing
alternative representations of tables so that an automatic
checker can find out whether or not such an alternative version
of the table exists. I suggest taking advantage of both the
TITLE attribute on a the A element and the ID of the TABLE.
For example, we might have something like:

See the <A HREF="alternative.html" TITLE="table alternative id:tab10">alternative version of the following table</A>

<TABLE ID="tab10" ...>
...
</TABLE>

While we currently recommend the LINK element for an entire
alternative page, but it seems to me it wouldn't hurt
to extend this scheme to other partial-page alternative
text. For example,

>4.x All audio information has an associated transcript

So that we might have something like:

Bill Clinton's <A HREF="bc30.wav" ID="bc30">speech on Sox the cat</A>
(A HREF="bc30.txt" TITLE="audio alternative id:bc30">transcript</A>).

Any takers? Anyone have another way of doing this in a well-defined
way?

Josh Krieger
CAST

Received on Thursday, 28 May 1998 10:49:45 UTC