- From: Kasday, Leonard <kasday@att.com>
- Date: Thu, 23 Oct 1997 23:26:32 -0400
- To: w3c-wai-ig@w3.org
More thoughts on giving textual descriptions of groups of element to give blind surfers more concise, meaningful descriptions instead of a string of elements. As Jason suggested, Al's generalized META, http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/w3c-wai-hc/1997OctDec/0063.html can indeed do the job. In fact, there's no need to define new attributes. For example <META name="DESC" content="Ralph holding menu in front of his diner" TGTCLASS="sign upper_body left_hand menu right_hand lower_body" > would tell the browser that the collection of objects specified by the id's in TGTCLASS are collectively described by the description "Ralph holding a menu in front of his diner". In this example, The element with id="sign" is a <P>, and the rest are images, except for menu, which is a form with a pulldown list. This simplifies if all the elements of the group are within a container e.g. a table cell. No id's are needed then. <TD> <META name="DESC" content="Ralph holding menu in front of his diner"> Ralph's Diner <TABLE> [ cells holding pictures and a form for the menu ] <TABLE> </TD> Putting the META inside the container makes it apply to the rest of the objects in the container, as explained by Al. ========================== This would be used as follows: The browser would have an "overview" mode in which it would simply read the DESC when it came to this group, instead of tediously reading each of the elements. Of course, the user could read the elements if s/he wanted to. Also, groups could have nested sub-groups using this scheme. (In other words, semantically, albeit not syntactically, it's just like VRML.) So surfer could browse in a meaningful structural way, instead of just hearing a bunch of elements. At the same time, designers could build their pages using any combination of elements tables, etc, without worrying about the structure of the HTML, because the browser would read the structure defined by the META tags, not the HTML. Note that I added another issue in here: using "DESC" as the value of "NAME" instead of an attribute in its own right. This avoids changing HTML, and allows us to add LONGDESC, FUNCTIONAL_DESC, etc also without changing HTML. On the other hand, the issue will re-emerge as discussion about what names' to use. Plus it's more to type. We could also just add a DESC attribute. That leaves name and contents for future use. I could support either way. Anyway, if we accept Al's META proposal, no further changes are needed syntactically: but these semantics would have to be implemented. Len Opinions my own, not necessarily those of my employer. ==================================== kasday@att.com phone 732 949 2693 Leonard R. Kasday Room 1J-316A AT&T Laboratories 101 Crawfords Corner Rd. Holmdel NJ 07733
Received on Thursday, 23 October 1997 23:27:11 UTC