Comments on: Quiz 1.1.7: Long Descriptions redux

by: Alfred Fuller

Fri, 06 Jan 2006 03:27:34 +0000

I like B best, even though it takes up territory. If the charts do not add to the page, but merely repeat information, they don’t need to be there. it they add to the information, there should be space to describe them.

by: Blooms

Sat, 31 Dec 2005 14:53:54 +0000

thank you for interesting articles

by: Charles Belov

Tue, 23 Aug 2005 00:20:32 +0000

sfmuni.com uses the D link, which we learned of from the VTA, San Jose’s transit agency. If it’s been deprecated, we’ll look at replacing it. I’d say A, no close window button, or else put the data table next to the graph and don’t bother hiding it or putting it elsewhere.

by: Bob Easton

Sun, 03 Jul 2005 10:24:39 +0000

Jules: We asked about d-links as bonus points part of the previous quiz. No one reports seeing them used in real life. The W3C is marking then “deprecated” in WCAG version 2.0. They’re a failed idea and even the W3C recognizes that fact.

Phil: We covered quite a few hiding techniques in a series of testing. “Off left” is my favorite. Check out the results and examine the test cases for coding techniques.

by: Phil Thompson

Fri, 01 Jul 2005 15:03:15 +0000

Jules: No-one has mentioned the “D” link, I imagine, because we have all read Joe Clarke’s book, which rubbishes them, and therefore disregarded them from our thought process. Actually, I have never seen a “D” link on a site anywhere so it surprises me when you say you’ve seen various incarnations of their usage.

I am however intrigued by the idea of hiding a description off-left of the screen.

by: Jules

Thu, 30 Jun 2005 14:34:38 +0000

I am surprised no one mentioned the “D” link which is a link using the link text “D” (I have seen various incarnations of this, D, [D], (D)) to the longdesc page (in case a browser doesn’t support longdesc).

Another possibility might be to create a caption and then “hide” it using left: -1000 so that it doesn’t take visible space but is available for screen readers. I know that Andy Clarke uses (used? I haven’t checked lately) this method to “hide” the Skip Nav link.

by: Mike Stenhouse

Thu, 23 Jun 2005 12:27:46 +0000

I had a similar problem when consulting for a large UK supermarket. I eventually went with linking up the image to a longdesc-type page. An added bonus was that the image content effectively became searchable. The full description of the image could also be of benefit to sighted users who want more detail than the images immediately provided without squinting.

One modification to A is to write out your close window link with Javascript, checking for the presence of a window.opener. That way if the window isn’t a popup, you don’t get the close link…

by: Marco

Wed, 22 Jun 2005 15:19:26 +0000

Primary E, but only visible to the screen readers. Reason being that the images are all artwork related.

I can also see method C working, but that would depend on how descriptive you want to be. Trying to describe artwork in 60-64 characters would be pretty tough to effectively do.

(In fact, trying to describe any artwork to someone who is visually impaired is tough to do.)

by: Georg

Tue, 21 Jun 2005 15:43:45 +0000

B is my general solution when an image - chart or whatever - need description for it all to make sense.

E, visible to all in most cases, looks like a good option.

by: Bob Easton

Tue, 21 Jun 2005 10:51:00 +0000

Using the “stick to the published standards” logic, we should be finding “D-links” all over the net. We don’t. They were a bad idea and the W3C has made them deprecated in WCAG 2.0.

Sticking to the published standard didn’t help wood spoked wheels survive very long on automobiles, did it?

We can stick to the published standard, or we can help improve the published standard with better techniques.