- From: Janina Sajka <janina@rednote.net>
- Date: Thu, 16 Feb 2012 22:30:04 -0500
- To: Leif Halvard Silli <xn--mlform-iua@xn--mlform-iua.no>
- Cc: Laura Carlson <laura.lee.carlson@gmail.com>, Joseph Scheuhammer <clown@alum.mit.edu>, "wai-xtech@w3.org" <wai-xtech@w3.org>
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