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A long description on why I don’t like longdesc

The longdesc attribute in HTML is history. Finally. 

I had my gripe over the last few years with that attribute and I think it’s good that it’s gone. I dislike everything about it: Content gets hidden away, at a different URL. That’s unintuitive. And it even get’s worse: People don’t know how to use it properly – neither website authors, nor disabled people, nor browser vendors.

So it seems it is not useful for anybody. A website which uses it anyway is CSSquirrel. As you can see in this comic, you can’t see anything special in most cases. But there is a hidden transcript here. I argue it should be possible for everyone to use that transcript, but Kyle Weems, the author, disagrees:

The fact is, most sighted users don’t want to click on an image description for alt text, because they can see the image. And non-sighted users have access to the accessibility features like longdesc. If a web developer is going to be providing alternative text for complex imagery to the point that he or she would actually create a description hyperlink, why wouldn’t this same person go an extra three inches and just use the longdesc attribute? The premise that a simple hyperlink is somehow more likely to be used is false: lazy people will be lazy no matter what.

I can see the image, but I’d like to have the transcript at hand, too, and I can imagine that other people may want it, too. I can’t enlarge the text in the comic, it is no problem with the transcript. I may want to read it in another font, because the font used in the comic is rather difficult to read (for me, at least). Impossible in the image, no problem in the transcript. As is quoting.

Now, I’m a computer-savvy user and I can look up longdesc in the source code, but most people aren’t. So they would possibly benefit from a visible link to transcript.

Longdesc is not reliable and Weems (who does an incredible job criticizing and commenting HTML5s progress) sees that, too, so he writes the link into his sarcastic latest comic. It doesn’t matter for authors to support a feature, that is not supported by browsers. We didn’t see any use of (for example) @font-face before browsers implemented it roughly well. We didn’t see CSS3 selectors used until browsers implemented it. And we won’t see longdesc picked up by authors if browsers don’t support it well.

What really annoys me about the discussion is that the people in favor of longdesc seem to think we didn’t think trough it. This is not true. The decision against longdesc and in favor of alternative techniques doesn’t mean we think it is “some kind of badge of honor to go out of your way to exclude the blind” (John Foliot). The holy grail isn’t found on that issue, all in all for me longdesc has more problems then many other techniques which I as a HTML author don’t want to rely on (and never wanted it with HTML4). If the alt text isn’t enough, I like to have the long description written on the same page. This is as accessible as longdesc for blind people and for everybody else. That’s a better solution in my opinion.