Use of describedBy to associate captions with drawing objects and groups

[Richard Schwerdtfeger <schwer@us.ibm.com>]

I discussed this with the Workplace development team and they share the same frustration with captions when mapping to our accessibility API given that the captions are not associated directly with the drawing object.

The prefer the proposal of using describedBy like we are using with Dynamic Web Accessibility. Here, the description of an object can be referenced to the text in a div or some other text in the document whether visible or not. This allows for not having to duplicate alt text when you have prose too and it is very easily to implement.

So,

I would like to add this to Chieko's proposal to deal with captions. From a user agent's perspective I would do the following:

1. Take the caption association as the long desc if provided using the describedBy relationship and map it to the AccessibleDescription (ATK) or help text for MSAA
2. If a caption is not associated use <svg:desc> to provide the long desc and map it to the AccessibleDescription (ATK) or help text for MSAA
3. Use <svg:title> to override the drawing object name for mapping to the accessibleName


Cheers,
Rich

Rich Schwerdtfeger
Distinguished Engineer, SWG Accessibility Architect/Strategist
Chair, IBM Accessibility Architecture Review Board
blog: http://www-106.ibm.com/developerworks/blogs/dw_blog.jspa?blog=441

"Two roads diverged in a wood, and I -
I took the one less traveled by, and that has made all the difference.", Frost