On Mon, 10 Aug 2009 10:42:36 -0400, Remco <remc...@gmail.com> wrote:
On Mon, Aug 10, 2009 at 8:53 AM, Benjamin
Hawkes-Lewis<bhawkesle...@googlemail.com> wrote:
On 10/08/2009 04:05, Remco wrote:
A title is a short description, and could be the movie title in the
case of a video element.
WCAG 2 1.1.1 requires that:
"If non-text content is time-based media, then text alternatives at
least provide descriptive identification of the non-text content."
"Must at least" means that if you can't do it right, here is how to get it
only half-wrong (i.e. not good practice, but enough to be useful anyway)
"title" and "aria-labelledby" seem sufficient for this purpose.
So do "figure" and "legend":
http://dev.w3.org/html5/spec/Overview.html#the-figure-element
An alt is a textual alternative for the content.
[snip]
For video, audio, object, iframe, this is a little sparse.
[snip]
But Elephants Dream may not be a good example for a video where an alt
text would be useful. It's simply too complicated to replace with
alternative text. But if you have a short video that explains
something on Wikipedia, it would be tremendously helpful if the alt
text would convey the same meaning. A video of a ball falling to show
what gravity is, could have the alt text: "A ball accelerates as it
moves down. Next to the ball's trajectory, a speedometer increases
with 9.8 m/s per second.".
If you ant to provide an alternative, then I suggest that is not a good
one. It is a description of the video, rather than a replacement.
An alternative is something more like
"As a ball falls, every second it goes 9.8m/s faster than it was going a
second before, because gravity makes it accelerate. In practice, effects
such as "drag" (wind resistance) will affect the actual speed - and the
value of 9.8 is specific to the average sea-level of earth - it depends on
the mass of the earth and the ball."
If you already have this in the preceeding or following text, something
like Benjamin's examples, then the job is done and repeating it in alt is
redundant and bad practice.
To be clear, your example text is better than nothing - and in
accesibility that is often as good as it gets :( But there's value to
explaining how to do things better - and this particular issue is
something that has gathered a *huge* amount of discussion and explanation
over the last decade and a half.
[snip]
To be clear, I think that the existing options for video in HTML5 are
better than anything we would gain by adding an alt attribute. The only
value I can see in adding one is that some people who are careful enough
to use it with images will also use it effectively even if they will do
nothing better - but this would require careful large-scale study of
authors *as they work* to verify, and I doubt that is going to be done.
--
Benjamin Hawkes-Lewis
One advantage of this is that the alternative content is now by
default always visible (or can be made visible in the case of
<details>). That makes it much more useful for normal use cases (no
network problems or disabled audience), which means it would be
provided a lot more. This is a lot better than the current situation
with alt.
The question now is: why would we need both <figure> and
aria-describedby?
Because many designers will not put sufficiently complete text
explanations of everything in the ordinary flow of a document. This is
actually a valuable accessibility practice - the large number of people
who have difficulty reading can often find that their ability to use
content is significantly reduced by the presence of large blocks of text.
This is something that most usability engineers and communication experts
understand instinctively, actually.
So we need some way that allows for more than one presentation scenario.
Either we ask people to make multiple pages (something that is well-known
to suffer from the "out of sight out of mind" problem, or we provide ways
to manage more information in a single page (which also suffers from the
problem, but it is believed less so. I don't know how many careful studies
have been done of this, if any).
cheers
Chaals
--
Charles McCathieNevile Opera Software, Standards Group
je parle français -- hablo español -- jeg lærer norsk
http://my.opera.com/chaals Try Opera: http://www.opera.com
