Re: [office] accessibility caption proposal comments

[Bruce D'Arcus <bruce.darcus@OpenDocument.us>]

On Jun 5, 2006, at 4:44 PM, Dave Pawson wrote:

>> > How do you see one as better than the other?
>>
>> OK, let's break apart two separate issues: association and semantics.
>>
>> On the second, my contention is that "caption" is an important 
>> semantic
>> structure, and so deserves its own element. To say something is
>> "describedBy" is -- per above -- rather vague.
>
> I'm sure we could argue that either way.
> Caption has fairly clear semantics to me, but my gut
> reaction is that it's a brief, rather than full description?

Sounds right.

>> If we ARE going to go down the road of using attributes to make this
>> association, then I think:
>>
>> a) we need to give it much more thought so that we adopt a consistent
>> approach to these problems
>> b) it needs to happen in conjunction with the metadata effort
>
> No real arguments.
>
> I'm willing to support a nested  text equivalent to an image
> or drawing. Naming to be agreed on.
> Not sure I'd support RDF to mark up such a description.
> Simple inlines and some block (probably basic para class of markup)
> would seem natural to me?

We're still a ways away from a specific suggestion for that use case 
(and the TC has still to approve the use cases in any case, once we 
finish them!), but my hunch in writing it was that the caption would 
indeed be plain text, but that it might possibly be auto-generated from 
separate metadata, either embedded in the image (a la XMP), or stored 
somewhere in the file wrapper. So, yeah, we're on the same page.

There has, however, also been some discussion of adding metadata within 
the content file by using the existing style system (but enhanced with 
an optional uri), but we're not yet at the stage where we're discussing 
that in any depth. You could imagine, though, that it could involve 
tagging a title within a caption with a "title" span style, which 
happened to have a uri that corresponded to dc:title. Presumably that 
could be helpful for accessibility since not only would the software 
know it is now reading, say, a caption for an image, but also when it 
comes across its title.

Bruce