Re: From the HTML-WG about aria-hidden

Leif Halvard Silli writes:
> Janina Sajka, Thu, 16 Feb 2012 21:50:43 -0500:
> > It seems to me a lot of complication is being concocted to serve a
> > function far more simply served by longdesc. I still suggest a shave
> > with Occam's Razor.
> 
> I am not certain that that is a good point: Even without @hidden, one 
> can do the same thing - but with more work for the author.
> 
Well, if the image is ever to be reused on some other page, it's much
more work to copy all the text and markup than to simply supply a URI
via an attribute. And, it then becomes a real nightmare to keep such
text updated correctly.

That's the point of Occam's Razor--the simplest solutions tend to be the
correct ones. I just don't see a justification for the complication--let
alone the question of whether it would actually work as intended (which
I don't believe it would).

> Also, @longdesc only works for <img> - while @aria-describedby and 
> @hidden can be used all over.
> -- 
Well, that's a reasonable goal, but it's also very much in the power of
the spec creators to expand where any attrib might be used, e.g. in
Issue-203 we propose it for the media elements.


Bottom line, describedby is the wrong ARIA solution. There will be a
future ARIA equivalent of longdesc--but it won't be describedby.
Meanwhile, attempting to shoehorn all of this into describedby is
putting its legitimate functions at risk, and that just isn't
acceptable.

Janina

> Leif Halvard Silli

-- 

Janina Sajka,	Phone:	+1.443.300.2200
		sip:janina@asterisk.rednote.net

Chair, Open Accessibility	janina@a11y.org	
Linux Foundation		http://a11y.org

Chair, Protocols & Formats
Web Accessibility Initiative	http://www.w3.org/wai/pf
World Wide Web Consortium (W3C)

Received on Friday, 17 February 2012 03:30:33 UTC