sellability of D-link vs. LONGDESC

to follow up on what Dave Raggett said:
> 
> If you have good evidence that content providers are willing
> to support the "D" tag then perhaps longdesc is unnecessary.
> I have yet to see this on popular sites though.
>  

What you currently see on popular sites is not acceptable.
That was stated by the W3C as its reason for launching the WAI.

Whether it will be easier to persuade and train people to
implement accessible websites with visible links to descriptions
or the LONGDESC attribute -- that's an open question and a
judgement call.  My personal opinion is that the big problem is
persuading people to provide a verbal description.  If they buy
the need to do that, I don't think they will have a big problem
making a visible link.

Since the job of doing that persuading and training will fall to
the IPO, and not the HTML WG, we should probably give the
accessibility community [for whom I cannot speak without first
asking] the upper hand in making this judgement call.

I want to reiterate that I don't think the LONGDESC issue is a
big one.  We can add LONGDESC to IMG and still train people that
visible links should be preferred for the next year or so because
LONGDESC isn't implemented in enough of the browsers in the hands
of the disabled.  Or we can proceed with increasing awareness and
compliance without LONGDESC.  It doesn't appear to me to make a
big difference in our prospects for progress.

--
Al Gilman

Received on Saturday, 13 September 1997 13:48:09 UTC