James M Snell wrote: > True, however, while unlikely, the title and summary can each > contain complex markup. If accessibility guidelines were to > suggest using those elements as the alternate text for the > icon/logo, then the guidelines would need to suggest > appropriate content restrictions for each or else specify a > processing model so markup can be dealt with appropriately.
Right. Restrictions on titles and summaries are needed even for users without disabilities, like we discussed a while back when we were debating whether Atom processors should support HTML/XHTML content in titles. > > 3. Media link entries or enclosure entries can provide accessible > > alternatives inline, possible using foreign markup. For example, a > > media link entry for an image could include alternative > > text for blind users in the <atom:summary> element. However, I > > think this is bad practice, because it overloads the meaning of > > <atom:summary>, but it is probably better than nothing. > > Actually, this is one of the main reasons why atom:summary is > provided. > If the atom:content has binary content, or if it uses the > src attribute, the atom:summary element needs to be used to > provide a human readable description. It definitely is not > bad practice. Let's say that the media resource is a chart. A reasonable summary might be "A rough projection of annual sales, based on sales through July 17th. Contact your department manager if you have questions." An (accessible) alternative would be a HTML table with the data that was used for the chart. A feed reader or editor is likely to provide only a limited amount of space for the summary (see FeedDeamon for example), which makes viewing a table embedded into the summary difficult. For a variety of reasons, summaries usually need to be short, but accessible alternatives may not be compact. Plus, atom:summary cannot be used to provide multiple accessible alternatives for one resource, which is needed to handle different disabilities. For those reasons, atom:summary should be used only as a fallback when no accessible alternative is available. - Brian
