RE: [Techs] Short text alternatives for object element

> Therefore, (4) text alternatives provided in this manner (as recommended 
> by Technique 10.5 in HTML Techniques for WCAG 2.0) will often be useless 
> as an aid to accessibility

The concern is hypothetical, since <object> is so rarely used. 
Nonetheless, you're acting as though <object> were a replacement for 
<img>. (It is in XHTML 2, but who cares about that?) <object> is meant to 
replace the nonstandard <embed>. The whole idea is a failure, but since 
we're trying to understand how it's supposed to work, then for 
accessibility we're talking about:

<object>
 	{multimedia with captions and/or descriptions}
</object>

That's it, really. Of course you could imagine nesting other <object> 
elements with e.g. still pictures with text equivalents, but that's not 
the purpose of <object>. Someone from Australia will write in to emphasize 
hypothetical counterexamples, but they can be ignored.

In any event, a conforming screen reader would recognize that it cannot 
render a still image and would instead read a nested text equivalent. This 
behaviour is in no way different from the way they currently handle <img>. 
That same screen reader would give direct access to the multimedia; 
user-agent issues are entrained in that process, but they're not our 
responsibility.

There simply isn't a problem. Remember, the screen reader is also a user 
agent. Don't be misled by what a browser does without a screen reader..

-- 

     Joe Clark | joeclark@joeclark.org
     Accessibility <http://joeclark.org/access/>
     Expect criticism if you top-post

Received on Wednesday, 18 August 2004 21:35:12 UTC