Re: meta comments on XML Accessibility Guidelines - n images

Al Gilman wrote:

[snip]
> How can I put it?  I think that the fact that Paul felt moved
> to ask shows that there is a use for something beyond the operational
> requirements on the instances that are captured in the WCAG and UAAG.

I completely agree that XAG should have detailed requirements
that allow authors to specify relationships known to be
useful to machines in the promotion of accessibility.

The (snipped) topic of explicit (URIs or IDREFs) v. implicit 
(element semantics) associations is a good one to cover; I hadn't
thought about this before. I don't think that HTML 4's 
scope/headers/axis attributes have caught on. You could say that 
OBJECT hasn't either, but that's not a good comparison (since IMG 
works fine for most people's use of images). smil:switch is a better 
example of something that seems to have caught on.

This comparison doesn't answer the question "When's the
right time to design for explicit/implicit associations?",
which is what XAG might try to answer. However, to justify
its appearance in XAG, a discussion of this design topic
should call out why this is important to accessibility,
rather than a generic language design issue.

  - Ian
-- 
Ian Jacobs (ij@w3.org)   http://www.w3.org/People/Jacobs
Tel:                     +1 718 260-9447

Received on Wednesday, 4 December 2002 10:09:41 UTC