Re: Long desc for SMIL spec

[this is thread started between Phil Hoschka, Mark and myself on
 adding textual description to the SMIL spec]

Mark writing:
> The more interesting part of this are the preformmated ascii art of
> the timing sequences. These really need a written description
> because they are really meaningless to the screen reader user as
> just text.  
> I am wondering if it won't be better to render these as
> graphics and use >the alt and longdesc to describe them.


Mark is refering to the series of diagrams drawn using plain text in
the current SMIL spec. 

Example (showing different length but parallel audio and video tracks
represented using dash lines bounded by a | character):

<PRE>  
   audio
|----------|
   video
|----....------|
</PRE>
<P>Figure 6.1:  Effect of a delay on playout schedule for different
                settings of the sync attribute

DD:: I think the author should be allowed to use PRE and ascii art
instead of more expensive (in size) images.

So we need to come up with a new guideline to attach both a short and
long description to PRE representing graphical information.

For the short description, I think we should require a caption in the
markup, following and preceeding the PRE used as graphics.

The SMIL spec seems to cover that well (e.g. Figure 6.1)

For the longdesc, I would fallback to a D link anchor at the end of
the caption.

So to illustrate what I mean on the example above: 

<PRE>  
   audio
|----------|
   video
|----....------|
</PRE>
<P>Figure 6.1: Effect of a delay on playout schedule for different settings
           of the sync attribute. <A HREF=desc61.html class=d-link>D</A>

Comments ?

Received on Monday, 6 April 1998 07:59:27 UTC