How accessibility is decided in the specs

[Stomme poes]

And also, you'd understand how stupidly insulting it is to call someone "a baby" because they ask for and get assistance sometimes.

You missed it entirely. It's how a person feels when they have to ask friends, family and strangers to help them with stuff, when they'd rather be able to do it themselves. I'm not calling them babies. I'm saying it's how you feel when you know, if someone else had kept you in mind, you could have done it yourself. People want to be able to do things themselves. Around here, motorised chairs are way more popular than manual ones.

[rguy84]

An example from the accessibility sphere is the "longdesc" attribute. If you ask users what they want in terms of images, they will frequently claim that what would be most useful for them is a way of getting longer descriptions of what images are. However, if you actually look at how AT users interact with the Web, it becomes abundantly clear that this isn't true: by and large they never actually seek out longer descriptions of images; indeed, they generally don't find any need to even know that there _are_ images.

But to flip the whole longdesc debate over, you can say that most people who use AT don't use longdesc feature because the software might or might not know how to read it. You then argue "well version 1, didn't know how to read longdesc but version 2 does. See we gave people to grab the longdesc, and nobody with disabilities are using it!" What people that make the argument fail to understand is that version jump can cost $200-1200. I know I cannot shell out that much for an upgrade. Given that a user can upgrade, the keystroke to fetch/go to /whatever the longdesc is probably not easy to recall. Since there are a hundred or so hotkeys.

I will say i am not a proponent of longdesc. I think that if a person is going to spend a paragraph or two about a description of an image, they should be putting that on the page, not hiding it behind a longdesc URL.

We found similar things when we did the usability studies for the microdata feature (yes, we actually did usability studies for parts of HTML!). For example, people would claim to understand certain aspects of the feature, but would be unable to actually use them. It was only when we simplified the model beyond the point where authors claimed understanding that we ended up with a model that authors actually, in practice, understood.

There needs to more info here. Claiming to know something and using it are very different things. You say they are unable to use it. Is it a lack of knowledge? Lack of skillset? lack of the AT? If it is the later, that is a poor example.

Similarly, when you think of how to activate the playback of a media resource for a blind user, you would never consider having the video element be represented by an image, since the user can't see images. You would want instead to just expose playback controls and information about the nature of the video (typically it's title or other advisory information). This information would either be something inline in the page (e.g. in a paragraph adjacent to the video) or in the title="" attribute.

This is a very fine line. I can see why you are saying posteralt is a mute subject. While I know people that put call me at 555-1212 in the 'poster' frame of a video to give non-video-related information to the viewer. that information could be important. However if the person making the video is using that to get out of writing out a summary, then can we depend on them to fill out posteralt? nope, we would need to do OCR on that image.

Note: I started this post around 3 or 4 PM EST on Nov 15, but had to run out the door. I have not seen new comments on this thread, so if I am saying something somebody else said, that is why.

[ralph.m]

@ Hixie, KarlGroves, stevefaulkner, shelleyp, jensimmons, johnfoliot, nowarninglabel

Welcome to SitePoint!

Even though this is a contentious issue, it's great to have so many new and interesting voices in the forums. A really interesting debate. Hopefully we will see more of you all around here!

[Stomme poes]

Objections to the Change Proposal for no Poster short alt text.