- From: Jason White <jasonw@ariel.ucs.unimelb.edu.au>
- Date: Thu, 10 Jun 2004 14:57:44 +1000
- To: "Cynthia Shelly" <cyns@exchange.microsoft.com>
- Cc: "Mike Barta" <mikba@microsoft.com>, "Web Content Guidelines" <w3c-wai-gl@w3.org>
Cynthia Shelly writes: > > Ok, it makes sense (at level 2 or 3) to not require the user to do extra > stuff to get the description, but calling it "extreme changes of > context" seems confusing. Could we instead say "Text alternatives can be > accessed without additional action by the user" or something like that? First, I note that the concept of a "long description" is very HTML-centric. We need to allow for scenarios in which different devices receive different presentations of the information, some of them involving non-text content where this can be rendered for the user, and others not. We also need to recognize that in some technologies or approaches to content design there may be no distinction between long description and short, just two different versions of a piece of content, one of them essentially structured text, and the other non-text content. Thus I would rather not rely on concepts such as "long description" in the guidelines if possible. Secondly, if the description is "explicitly associated" with the non-text content, then surely the user agent, the server-side adaptation service, or whatever, can satisfy the user's preference by rendering the description automatically, or only in response to the user's action. I am not sure how an additional criterion at levels 2 or 3 would work, as it involves making assumptions about how the content will be processed, for example that it will be read directly by a user agent that handles descriptions in certain ways.
Received on Thursday, 10 June 2004 00:58:00 UTC