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Re: LONGDESC in HTML5?

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From: Jukka K. Korpela
Date: Sep 24, 2010 3:21PM

John Foliot wrote:

>> 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.

In which point exactly? Can you cite actual use of longdesc attributes in a
manner that makes content more accessible to real people using real
browsers?

> The simple fact of the matter is that while adoption has been slow,

"Slow" is euphemism for "nonexistent" here.

> 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)

You are not citing any actual usage, still less pointing out why it would be
beneficial in accessibility terms, just referring to a compilation of
accessibility policies which are, to be honest, just documents people have
produced without making anyone change their authoring habits.

> 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.

That's fine. They, or the powers behind them, must stop pretending that some
illusionary attributes promote accesssibility. It would be wrong to help
them in living in such illusions (avoiding all the hard work that real
accessibility might imply).

> Nothing you can say
> or argue removes this fundamental fact.

There's no "fact" involved. Please don't obscure things by calling the
policies that someone might favor "facts". Real facts are things that all
people agree on, because they are directly observable - no need for
"policies" and "opinions".

> *EVERYONE* who has worked on this issue within the standards bodies

... must have observed how far they are from the reality. (I presume you
mean real standars bodies, such as ISO and CEN, not industry consortia,
which tend to be a little less unrealistic.)

> but virtually none believe that @longdesc is not a useful technique

And nobody can cite an example of its being actually useful. And I mean the
URL of a real web page, not a contrived and typically childish example of
how it "might" be used.

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