Re: XHTML 2 Role Tag

Hi Dave and Jason;

I think it rather depends on what you're trying to achieve, and in what
format.  If you just want to say that this is some form of navigational
element set, that's fine, but say that navigational set related to some
specific content, then spatial relationships may very well indicate that.
Sure, they'll be accessible, in that you can read the actionable items and
you can perform the interaction.  However, I would consider them less then
usable, as it's something of trial and error to work out what content those
actionable items relate to.

An example may be that you have a lot of image links positioned in vertical
alignment, running left to right.  These will be read in left to right
sequential order, but underneath them you have some text describing the sort
of content they link to, which again will be read in sequential order.  You
can of course, remember the order of the text descriptions, and then go and
find the nth image that relates to the sort of content you want to look at.
However, knowing the spatial relationships between the images and text would
speed up the interaction.

Sure, there's different HTML coding techniques that could make this easier,
but it's unlikely that an author would take these.  Thinking about it from
the author's perspective, what's there motivation in doing this?  It's
usually just to get something up on the web with the minimal of effort.  So,
it would be unlikely that they would want to spend additional resources in
performing tasks beyond their original motivation for creating the original
content.  That's one reason why the majority of alt text is either missing
or less than adequate.

Will
----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Pawson, David" <David.Pawson@rnib.org.uk>
To: <jasonw@ariel.its.unimelb.edu.au>
Cc: "Will Pearson" <will-pearson@tiscali.co.uk>; <wai-xtech@w3.org>
Sent: Friday, November 12, 2004 9:03 AM
Subject: RE: XHTML 2 Role Tag


OK. Summary Will, no interest in spatial relationship.

Quoting Jason.

 On the Web I run Lynx or Emacs/W3 and, in the latter, set it up to
linearize everything. As a result I lose all of the spatial relationships
and I don't regard this as a significant loss.

Sometimes it is important to navigate through tables (meaning genuine data
tables, not tables used for layout) cell by cell, across the rows or down
the columns. I suppose that could be called "spatial" although it is more
taking advantage of the table structure. Layout tables can just be
linearized and things almost always turn out in a reasonable order. In fact
I never knew tables were used for layout until it was mentioned in an
accessibility seminar in the mid 90's. I had been using Lynx over a telnet
connection to a Solaris machine to access the Web, and the whole issue of
layout tables as an accessibility problem simply didn't arise in that
environment.

The only context I can think of where spatial relationships might have
mattered is with form controls and their labels, if the author hasn't used
the LABEL element. Even there, the point is that the label occurs
immediately before or after the control, and whether it is to the left, to
the right, or above really doesn't matter - in fact it can create confusion
as one then has to determine whether the label for the control is the one
that precedes it or the one that follows, and if the LABEL element isn't
used one has to judge this from context.

dp. It educated me too.

hth DaveP.

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Received on Friday, 12 November 2004 16:39:14 UTC