[html4all] Article by Catherine: Feedback on accessibility concerns in HTML5

[Joshue O Connor]

Hi Jason,

Jason White wrote:
> Having the description or alternative included in the document at least avoids
> the possibility of broken links, to which @longdesc is subject. It also makes
> copying the alternative easier, i.e., one doesn't have to bring along a
> separate HTML document for each image that warrants a detailed explanation.

Yes, I think so to so thats +1 for that.

> XHTMl 2.0 has solved the problem in two ways.
> 
> 1. IMG is now a container element, the content of which can serve as an
> alternative to the image.
> 
> 2. The SRC attribute is available for a wide variety of container elements,
> the contents of which can again serve as alternatives to images referred to
> via @src.
> 
> The IMG element is retained for backward compatibility only.
> 
> Both of these, in my opinion, are well engineered solutions. 

Good stuff.

>Why should HTML 5
> reinvent the wheel when XHTML 2.0 has an elegant, practical and largely
> backward-compatible solution already? This is a rhetorical question. HTML 5
> should follow the lead of XHTML 2.0 in this and other areas.

Good questions and of course good answers :-)  I guess the successful
implementation of one should of course inform the other.

> Orca, for example, doesn't use an OSM at all. Instead, it relies entirely on
> an accessibility API to expose the user interface of the application. 

Thanks for that info Jason. I didn't know that and thought that the only
other screen reader that didn't use the OSM was HAL, though I guess in
the future that will change to the DOM or some other APi.

Cheers

Josh