LONGDESC usage statistics?

Does anyone have actual usage statistics on the LONGDESC tag? 
My guess would be that it is rarely used on the web as compared
to the ALT tag. Unlike the ALT tag, which plays a double role 
by also giving a nice "tooltip" popup to sighted users of 
several mainstream browsers, LONGDESC seems to serve a much 
smaller audience. Is there any chance that this will change? 
Anything that burdens website developers without also giving 
some special attraction to the (sighted) majority of their 
website visitors is unlikely to ever become popular, whether 
we like it or not.

I was checking Leonard Kasday's nice test page with The vOICe
Internet sonification browser option, but image maps are not
yet supported by The vOICe Learning Edition, so the current 
version 1.38 only outputs the image and link list as appended 
below. Version 1.39 will support the AREA tags of image maps, 
but I must admit that I am not yet very enthusiastic about 
adding LONGDESC support (after all, I do not plan full HTML
support, just a small subset to provide sufficient access to
images, while "sufficient" may for me include considerations
on usage statistics).

Best wishes,

Peter Meijer


Seeing Web Images through Sound - The vOICe
http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/Peter_Meijer/eyebrows.htm

===

For the URL http://astro.temple.edu/~kasday/web_access/image_map.html
The vOICe Learning Edition v1.38 currently outputs:

  0 http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/w3c-wai-ig/2000JanMar/0067.html
    LINK results (a thread in the WAI IG mailing list)
  1 images/compass4.gif
    IMAGE Picture of a Compass.
  2 images/compass4.gif
    IMAGE Select a direction
  3 images/balloons.gif
    IMAGE Balloons
  4 images/compass4.gif
    IMAGE Select a direction
  5 http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/w3c-wai-ig/2000JanMar/0067.html
    LINK Here's results documented in a thread in the WAI interest group
  6 http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/w3c-wai-ig/2000JanMar/0067.html
    LINK results
  7 mailto:kasday@acm.org
    LINK kasday@acm.org
  8 http://www.iconbazaar.com/
    LINK 
  9 images/iconbazaar.gif
    IMAGE Icon Bazaar

Received on Thursday, 13 January 2000 10:42:50 UTC