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Re: LONGDESC in HTML5?

for

From: John Foliot
Date: Sep 24, 2010 2:30PM

Jukka K. Korpela wrote:
>
> 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.

Jukka, with all due respect, you are simply wrong here. Further, if you
believe that using @longdesc is a waste of your time, don't use it -
nobody is putting a gun to your head.

The simple fact of the matter is that while adoption has been slow, there
are numerous cases of its usage, and documented existence of laws,
policies and guidelines that suggest your current opinion is not correct.
(http://www.d.umn.edu/~lcarlson/research/ld.html#glps)

Removing the existing @longdesc attribute from HTML5 breaks the basic
premise of HTML5 being backward compatible, and for those who *must* use
@longdesc due to their workplace requirements, it effectively means that
they cannot move towards using HTML5. Nothing you can say or argue removes
this fundamental fact.

*EVERYONE* who has worked on this issue within the standards bodies and
process agrees that there may be more effective means of ensuring access
to longer descriptions of images in many instances, but virtually none
believe that @longdesc is not a useful technique - one of many - that
should remain within the web author's toolkit. @longdesc fills a need, one
that is not met by any other native semantic means.

Seeking to keep a rich and useful toolkit to improve accessibility is not
a waste of anyone's time, except apparently yours. That's too bad really.

JF