- From: Kasday, Leonard <kasday@att.com>
- Date: Thu, 23 Oct 1997 10:04:38 -0400
- To: w3c-wai-ig@w3.org
Good point from Jason that Al's META and LINK extensions could apply here. More on that below. I just want to make sure that I'm clear that the grouping I'm talking about goes beyond reading order. For example, suppose theres a page with a picture of Ralph's Diner in the middle. Ralph is holding pull-down menu. And suppose this is implemented as A centered text heading, "Ralph's Diner" A 3 by 3 table below the heading. The contents of the table are top row, spanning three columns, Ralph's upper body. Middle row, Ralph's right hand, the menu, Ralph's right hand. Bottom row, spanning three columns, Ralph's lower body. Straightforward labeling with ALT text would produce Ralph's Diner Ralph's upper body, Ralph's right hand, pull-down-menu, Ralph's left hand, Ralph's lower body. Changing the reading order to put the menu at the end, say, would not help much. It would help to use ALT text better: e.g. having ALT="Ralph holding following menu" for top row, then leaving all the rest of the ALT text blank. This would read OK if the user were reading the whole page. However, it would give the browser no way to give the user an overview of the page containing just a description of the group of elements, viz. "Ralph holding menu in his diner". In other words, the user needs an overview which gives major groups of elements. For example, the browser may give the following overview Table of Contents Ralph holding menu in his diner Administrative footer User could then quickly go to table of contents (which is a group of text elements, say) and then open it up for greater detail. And go into Ralph holding menu in his diner and open it, etc. Or go to the administrative footer to read all the legal notice and contact the webmaster. This example can't be implemented by extensions to TABLEs because the elements do not all lie within tables. It would not be a good idea to require table wrappers, because they constrain how the page behaves during resizing. However, Al's generalization of LINK applies, and I'll happily abandon my request for <GROUP> in favor of it. We need to add a textual description to LINK though. Whether it be ALT, TITLE, LONGDESC is another issue. I'd favor ALT and LONGDESC but would go along with TITLE, although I'm still worried that it would be used for other purposes. Len
Received on Thursday, 23 October 1997 10:05:16 UTC