Comments on: Quiz 1.1.6: A picture requires a thousand words

By: patrick h. lauke

patrick h. lauke — Sun, 12 Jun 2005 10:39:09 +0000

not contributing any testing results as such, but just wanted to share that the issue of D-links was brought up at the recent @media2005 conference in London. one of the nicer ideas discussed (I think it was Ian Lloyd himself who suggested it) was to create a more natural D-link (if required) by creating a link in the image’s caption, and not with the W3C’s proposed [d] monstrosity.

By: Bob Easton

Bob Easton — Sun, 12 Jun 2005 11:34:27 +0000

Thanks Patrick.

That actually makes a subtle, albeit important, point about the longdesc attribute. It is intended solely for assistive technology. It’s not detectable in the normal browser. So, if sighted users can also benefit from the additional description page, some other link must be provided for them. D-links were a proposed method for providing these links, but are now (thank goodness) deprecated in WCAG 2.0.

Ian’s approach is much saner, and one I’ve used from time to time.

By: Anup

Anup — Sun, 12 Jun 2005 12:47:50 +0000

IBM Home Page Reader 3.0 displays the link above the image in its internal browser window, which is IE. (IE itself does not show the longdesc attribute as a link, however.)

Following the link replaces the same page/window, rather than opening a new window.

I will check Jaws at some point, unless someone else can get there before me!

Also, a minor note that with bar charts in particular, there is an accessible alternative which is quite elegant, over at http://www.standards-schmandards.com/index.php?2005/02/06/14-accessible-bar-chart

Saying that, of course there are other examples which are not as easy to convert into accessible tables or other text, as are bar charts.

By: Bob Easton

Bob Easton — Sun, 12 Jun 2005 17:58:57 +0000

IBM Home Page Reader 3.04 behaves much as Anup describes. It does display an added text link in the IE window which says “Image Description.” It also speaks these same words.

Upon returning from the long description page, HPR 3.04 resumes speaking immediately after the image, not from the top of the page.

By: Bob Easton

Bob Easton — Sun, 12 Jun 2005 18:02:46 +0000

Jaws 6.1 with IE 6.0 uses behavior “A.”

It announces the graphic as normal, using the ALT text, then adds “left paren press enter for long description right paren.”

Activating that link opens a new window, which is announced as a new window. After listening to the long description, closing the newly opened windos, and returning to the original window, JAWS begins reading from the top of the page as if it were newly loaded.

By: Robin

Robin — Mon, 13 Jun 2005 09:47:24 +0000

I work for a financial information company and a few of our older pages (from before I started) have D links. Horrible things. We now use longdescs on our charts pointing to the dynamically generated versions containing accessible tabular data.

By: Greg Perry

Greg Perry — Tue, 21 Jun 2005 19:49:06 +0000

Bob, please forgive me for “breaking into the middle of this thread” but I could not locate any email link to you.

Thanks for your words about Disabling America. I just read them on the StuffAndNonsense.co.uk Web site (http://www.stuffandnonsense.co.uk/archives/accessibility_and_a_society_of_control.html) and it’s nice to see others relate what I said and add their own to the mix.

Keep up the good work you’re doing on the access-matters site! - Sincerely, Greg Perry

By: Bob Easton

Bob Easton — Sat, 25 Jun 2005 11:09:45 +0000

Window Eyes 5.0 with IE 6.0

WE does not announce the longdesc link. Nor, does it announce the image. It does speak the image’s ALT text, but with no indication that it is describing an image.

A verbosity setting ( Global / Verbosity… / MSAA / Longdesc ) is not enabled by default. Enabling it makes no difference.

Clearly, I have too little experience with WE to understand this behavior.