Hi, Pranav- I've spent a good bit of time doing SVG accessibility research, and I'm interested in what you're doing here. Just for some background, I hacked a browser-extension screen -reader, FireVox, to support SVG, and tested various kinds of data visualizations for their general usefulness.
I found that one of the most annoying things was hearing extraneous or duplicate information. It was very hard to contextualize data visualizations anyway, but when the same information was duplicated in a visible text "label" (<text> element) and a title and/or description (<title> and <desc> elements), it "cluttered" the aural landscape, detracting from, not enhancing, the accessibility. So, yes, you are allowed to use <title> and <desc> as children of <text>, but in my experience, you should do so very sparingly, and only when the title differs significantly from the text content, or contextualizes it. As a general rule of thumb, <title> should only be used when it is critical for the parent element to be "rendered" to the AT. You also cannot count on <title> being displayed as a tooltip in all browsers, fwiw... The sad fact with Assistive Technologies is that they are very late to the game in supporting SVG. The SVG WG is trying to fix that, but we've got a way to go to define things well and get them implemented. AT usually doesn't support SVG at all, and when it does, it doesn't necessarily pick out the most important bits... It should pick out <text>, <tspan>, <textPath>, <title>, <desc>, etc. and read those off to the user, but it doesn't always. As another tip... though ARIA isn't guaranteed to work with SVG today, you should also use it appropriately, such as using @aria-describedby to denote a label, since that's the direction we're headed (and I've heard a rumor that it works in IE9). What you can do to help move these issues forward is to write up use-cases and requirements, and real-world examples of usage, and minimal test cases, and give those to the SVG WG to help clarify and find consensus about what is needed. Regards- -Doug Pranav Lal wrote (on 5/3/11 12:12 PM): > Hi James, > > Like you, I am going for the namespace approach. However, I am trying to > find a simpler way that I can use for SVG. Unfortunately, the viewer I am > using as of now does not support certain aspects of text in SBG. For > instance, though it is legal for me to imbed a<desc> tag in a<text> tag, > the viewer will not speak. The manufacturor of the viewer has his own schema > which works nicely. > > I am using a third party component to generate my SVG. I was hoping to find > a way around adapting to the manufacturor's schema but there is no help for > it. I will have to derive the structure of the SVG file and add the relevant > namespaces and elements. > > Pranav > > -----Original Message----- > From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] > On Behalf Of james_ingram_svg > Sent: Monday, May 02, 2011 2:21 PM > To: [email protected] > Subject: [svg-developers] Re: Title or desc tag in text tag? > > > > Hi Pranav, > I asked a very similar question a few months ago about including MIDI info > in musical scores written in SVG. [1] > > The answer I got lead to me using a custom namespace to include the temporal > info I needed. Its a much more flexible solution than just using the<title> > or<desc> tags. > My namespace [2] just contains MIDI info, but I'd be very interested in > hearing how you realize spoken text. > > best, > James > > [1]http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-svg/2010Oct/0160.html > [2]http://james-ingram-act-two.de/svgScoreExtensions.html > > --- In [email protected] > <mailto:svg-developers%40yahoogroups.com> , "Pranav Lal"<pranav.lal@...> > wrote: >> >> Hi David, >> >> Many thanks for your answer. I am working on creating SVG files for an >> accessible SVG viewer and am trying to get them to speak. More on that >> once the program is released. >> >> Pranav ------------------------------------ ----- To unsubscribe send a message to: [email protected] -or- visit http://groups.yahoo.com/group/svg-developers and click "edit my membership" ----Yahoo! Groups Links <*> To visit your group on the web, go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/svg-developers/ <*> Your email settings: Individual Email | Traditional <*> To change settings online go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/svg-developers/join (Yahoo! ID required) <*> To change settings via email: [email protected] [email protected] <*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: [email protected] <*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to: http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
