WebAIM - Web Accessibility In Mind

E-mail List Archives

Re: Longdesc not working

for

From: Jukka K. Korpela
Date: Jul 13, 2005 4:32AM

On Wed, 13 Jul 2005, Christian Heilmann wrote:

>> <img src="graphics_other/journal25_silver.jpg" alt=" the 25th Journal"
>> longdesc="d_files/journal25.htm"> <a href="d_files/journal25.htm"
>> target="_blank">d</a></div>
>
> Longdesc is not supported by most of the current browsers.

The longdesc attribute is basically just a theoretical idea (and a wrong
one at that) that never caught fire.

> You are doing the right thing, although
> the D link is considered by some to be superfluous.

I beg to differ. The longdesc attribute is useless, and the D link is
worse than useless: it is an enigma to anyone who is not acquainted with
this piece of "accessibility" jargon and hacking - that means a few
billions of people. Whether the alt attribute is adequate cannot be
decided, but considering the fact that it is particularly needed by
visually impaired people and the fact that speech synthesis is not very
advanced these days, I would prefer="the twenty-fifth Journal".

> What do you have in journal25?

That's surely an important question. So is the question why the image is
there. Assuming that the visitor does not see the image, and may not have
any way of looking at it, does he need some alternate content? If, for
example, it is just an illustration that shows the cover of a Journal in
the context of discussing the journal, and that context has been presented
in the text, then surely alt="" is adequate and anything else is a
distraction. If it contains some text (headlines etc.), then _they_ should
appear in the alt attribute, if that text is relevant and the image is the
only element that contains it.

> Longdesc is only needed if the image
> has a lot of complex data,

Longdesc is never needed and never helps in WWW terms.

Instead, include a normal link to a document that explains the
information content without images, if needed; and make the link
text as short as possible, but not shorter - "D" surely won't do.

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