WebAIM - Web Accessibility In Mind

E-mail List Archives

Re: Longdesc vs d

for

From: Jukka K. Korpela
Date: Oct 28, 2003 7:44AM

On Tue, 28 Oct 2003, ED COHEN wrote:

> Our question is how long, if at all, should we plan to use the "d" for
> complex graphics, since newer screen readers do support the "longdesc"
> tag?

You should use neither. Neither of them is required by 508 rules, and
neither of them is useful for actual accessibility.

Some people may say that such constructs are useful to _some_ people,
depending on their browsers and on their comprehension and guessing
skills (how many people intuitively understand the meaning of "[D]"?).
But wasn't accessibility supposed to mean accessibility to _all_?

For a complex graphic that has essential content expressible in words,
use a normal textual link to page that contains the verbal alternative.
You can often turn an image caption into such a link, but if needed,
simply include a separate link, like "A <a href="...">textual description
of our organization</a> is available, too".

Note that using several links with the same link text but pointing to
different locations (which is an inherent feature of the "[D]" link
technique) definitely violates WCAG checkpoint 13.1 as refined in the
associated HTML techniques document.

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


----
To subscribe, unsubscribe, suspend, or view list archives,
visit http://www.webaim.org/discussion/