[whatwg] Question regarding accessibility for img

[Benjamin Hawkes-Lewis]

Geoffrey Sneddon wrote:
> 
> On 30 Nov 2008, at 16:40, Pentasis wrote:
> 
>> I notice that it says in the spec under the img-section:
>>
>> "There has been some suggestion that the longdesc attribute from 
>> HTML4, or some other mechanism that is more powerful than alt="", 
>> should be included. This has not yet been considered."
>>
>> May I ask why it has not been considered (yet)?
> 
> Because there's an issues list of several thousand issues, and as such 
> not all issues have been considered. If we could do everything at once 
> we'd have a spec instantly. :)

Perhaps also worth noting that there's already been a quite epic amount 
of discussion of LONGDESC, if you care to search the archives. I suppose 
the text might be more accurate if it said "yet been decided".

A rough summary of the currently dominant view in WHATWG would be that 
visible descriptions are more useful than invisible descriptions and 
that in any case LONGDESC is poisoned by real-world abuse ( 
http://blog.whatwg.org/the-longdesc-lottery ).

--
Benjamin Hawkes-Lewis