Re: Alternate proposal for ISSUE-30 longdesc

On Mon, Feb 22, 2010 at 3:58 AM, Maciej Stachowiak <mjs@apple.com> wrote:
>
> Summary: Make the longdesc attribute on img elements conforming, but with a
> required validator warning. (Open issue: should longdesc be considered
> "obsolete but conforming" or just conforming to a warning? I'm willing to go
> with whatever the WG most prefers, the best option may be to ultimately make
> it consistent with the summary attribute.)
>
> http://www.w3.org/html/wg/wiki/ChangeProposals/LongdescConformingWithWarning

As far as I can see, this change proposal only contains two
"pro-longdesc" arguments:

The first one is

"A handful of sites (organizations for the disabled, government
entities, nonprofits, etc) go far beyond the norm in trying to provide
a good accessibility experience. They may be relying on longdesc to
improve the experience, and it would be disruptive to immediately make
such content nonconforming."

This seems to me to be an argument to allow implementations to
implement it, but as far as I can see is not an argument to keep it
valid. Compare for example to the bgcolor attribute, many sites use
it, and implementations are allowed to implement it, but it is still
specced as non-conforming and I don't hear anyone argue that it
shouldn't be.

The second argument in the change proposal is:

"Some laws, regulations and organizational policies may refer to
longdesc by name."

Using this as argument for keeping any feature seems very sad to me.
The idealist in me strongly prefers to add accessibility features
based on what helps people with accessibility needs, rather than what
local laws say. I realize that we need to be practical and not just
idealist, however I think the argument needs to be stronger than "laws
may exist".

/ Jonas


So this seems to leave us with the a

Received on Monday, 22 February 2010 12:23:00 UTC