

RE: Agenda: HTML-A11Y Media Subteam on 25 May at 21:30Z for 90 Minutes

From: John Foliot <jfoliot@stanford.edu>
Date: Tue, 24 May 2011 17:45:03 -0700 (PDT)
Message-ID: <011b01cc1a74$fbdc2960$f3947c20$@edu>
Silvia Pfeiffer wrote:
> > agenda+ Paused Media: Continuing Discussion
> And on this point, it would be good to get people's opinions/feedback
> a11y/2011May/0466.html

Hi Silvia,

I have been thinking about this more, and have a Draft email that I hope
to complete this evening. Sadly I will also be posting my regrets for
tomorrow's teleconference as I have a campus commitment I cannot avoid. 

There *may* be some issues/problems with our scheme, but I need/want to
involve some others into the discussion. At issue is how the text that
aria-describedby is subsequently processed - does it retain its markup
(for example when using <span lang="fr">) or does it become flattened
unstructured text. If it is the latter we might have a problem both with
i18n, but also with the solution to the longer description (<a

There is also a question about support for multiple values of
aria-describedby, both in terms of browser support, but equally if not
more importantly with AT support. This may not have a huge impact on
browsers, but coordination with AT vendors will be critical. For example,
we are looking at using 2 <p>'s with unique ids to provide text for both
visual objects. The question is/will be how is this read aloud?  Will it
be "text describing the video" [pause] "text describing the still image",
or will it be "text describing the video text describing the still image"?
(remembering that the describedby is referencing the *content* of the
container of the id, and not grabbing the semantics or behavior of the <p>
- this *might* be able to be mitigated by CSS3 Speech
(http://www.w3.org/TR/2003/WD-css3-speech-20030514/#pause-props) *IF* we
get some support from the screen readers and others (Voiceover, Chromevox,

Finally, I want to ping PFWG and the ARIA Working Group about the
possibility of adding new roles (role="mediadescription" and
role="posterdescription") as having them may also factor into a more
scalable and robust solution moving forward.

I recognize that we are building something for the future, so even
identifying these issues does not necessarily invoke stop-effort, but this
will require a fair bit of discussion and finessing to get right, and
involves numerous other players in the big picture game.

More this evening (all being well).

Received on Wednesday, 25 May 2011 00:45:32 GMT
