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Re: LONGDESC in HTML5?

for

From: Jukka K. Korpela
Date: Sep 24, 2010 1:39PM

Jared Smith wrote:

> As John notes, there is much controversy surrounding the longdesc
> attribute.

It's waste of time. Nobody outside the small circle of accessibility
advocators ever took longdesc seriously, still less used it in authoring.

> I've made some minor updates to our longdesc article
> (http://webaim.org/techniques/images/longdesc) to clarify our
> recommendations for its use.

That's pointless. Minor updates mean nothing, and major updates would not do
much good either.

> Longdesc is not an optimal approach, but it is an accepted approach

Accepted by whom? Some organizations pretending to be like standards bodies,
I presume. I don't thin 99.99% of werb page authors ever heard of the
attribute, still less accepted it.

> and one that is codified as an acceptable and recommended technique in
> international and U.S. laws and guidelines,

There are no international laws. US legislation pertaining to
government-funded sites might say this or that about the issue, but this
just means that they impose pointless burden on authors without achieving
any improvement in accessibility. Please provide actual evidence if you
thinkg otherwise; and evidence means showing that there is actual
improvement in accessibility (URLs welcome...).

> There is no question that we need better methods for providing longer
> image descriptions.

So include links to such descriptions if they are really useful.

> But as of right now, longdesc
> provides functionality and accessibility that is not available in any
> other way.

Completely wrong. The attribute just pointlessly duplicates the idea of a
link, making itself dependent on some fancy support to a longdesc attribute,
as opposite to a normal link.

--
Yucca, http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/