Home

longdesc needs to work for everyone, till then it's a fail

Tuesday, 24 August 2010

In response to:

Also, isn't it ironic that some people prefer aria-describedby over @longdesc when the "invisibility" of the attribute is used as an argument against @longdesc but not against aria-describedby (or other WAI-ARIA stuff)...

When supported both by the browser and the screen reader, the text contained in the elements specified in the aria-describedby attribute is automatically read by the screen reader. This is not the case with the longdesc attribute. We work with university students who are pretty adept at using the screen reader and many of them don't realize how to access the longdesc content (even though in JAWS it is as easy as pressing Enter). Until user agents (browsers) support access of the longdesc attribute for all users (not just users of adaptive technology), we don't recommend the longdesc attribute as the sole solution for providing alternate descriptions for complex content. Students with cognitive disabilities, ESL students, etc. all can benefit from a well written alternate description. We follow what WebAIM recommends and suggest adding a visible link with text like "An alternate description of Figure 3.2". For instance, a dyslexic student using Kurzweil 3000 to read the web can benefit from a text description since the extended literary description may make more sense than listening to Kurzweil try to read numbers and other information off of a chart or table.