Re: aria-describedat?

On Wed, Mar 14, 2012 at 9:44 AM, Benjamin Hawkes-Lewis
<[email protected]> wrote:
> On Tue, Mar 13, 2012 at 8:35 PM, Joseph Scheuhammer <[email protected]> wrote:
>> On 12-03-13 3:35 PM, Charles McCathieNevile wrote:
>>>
>>> It *is* pretty much the same thing
>>
>> Nit and possible benefit:  @aria-describedbyat can be used with any element.
>>  @longdesc is restricted to <img> only.
>>
>> Or, possible implementation headache :-)
>
> Spec writers are as free to allow @longdesc on other elements as they
> are to mint new attributes and allow them on other elements.
>
> For example, one idea under discussion at HTML WG would allow
> @longdesc to link to transcriptions for <video> elements.

The biggest problem I see with @longdesc is that it is exposed as text
in the IE DOM and as a link in other browsers. So, for backwards
compatibility reasons there can't be a interoperable implementation of
how to expose @longdesc in browsers. Accessibility APIs have dealt
with this issue and are converting IE's text to a link, so it's not a
problem for a11y, but only for browsers. Also, there aren't any
consistent ways of how to expose @longdesc in browser UIs - this was
always left to the browsers and browsers have mostly ignored the need
to expose it or implemented diverging solutions.

So, moving to a new attribute name, recommending consistent ways of
how to expose the link visually, and applying that attribute to more
than just the <img> element might help with getting off-page
descriptions for complex HTML elements.

All of this is, of course, dependent on browser & a11y API/tool
implementations. If there is no support for such a new attribute, the
whole discussion is moot.

Cheers,
Silvia.