October 2013 – Web Axe

Easy Chirp 2 soft beta launched!

Web Axe author Dennis Lembree has announced the soft release of Easy Chirp 2 beta! Easy Chirp, originally named Accessible Twitter, is a web-based Twitter application which is developed to be easy to use, robust (even works without JavaScript), and of course accessible. The service was down for a few months during a complete re-build mostly due to the closure of Twitter’s original API.

The soft launch is on the dot org domain; the service will be available on the dot com domain during the official release. Currently on the dot com domain, you can sign up for an announcement when the official launch occurs.

For more information, check out this blog about the Easy Chirp 2 beta by Laura Legendary (@Accessible_Info) on her Accessible Insights blog.

You can follow Easy Chirp on Twitter at @EasyChirp.

Longdesc Links, History, Future

Recently I Twittered daily about longdesc, the classic unsung HTML attribute which supports long descriptions of images. Here’s a summary of the tweets/links:

HTML5 Image Description Extension (longdesc) specification
Solving the longdesc problem (also read comments) by Leonie Watson
longdesk – a Firefox add-on to support the longdesc attribute by Anthony Ricaud
Longdesc Chrome extension
“User Agents and longdesc Discoverability” – ways browsers support longdesc, by @Laura_Carlson
Firefox 25: longdesc attribute now exposed in context menu (under HTML heading)
Longdesc Firefox add-on by @patrick_h_lauke
Help on long descriptions and longdesc by @WebAIM
jQuery Accessible Longdesc Plugin by @Ginader
Drupal issue to “Incorporate #longdesc into image support”

Some History

To make a long story short (pun intended), longdesc was made obsolete in HTML5 but then returned. I applaud @JohnFoliot, @Laura_Carlson, and @Chaals in their dedicated efforts to return longdesc. I agree it should remain as there is no sufficient ARIA replacement.

Here are more great links on the topic on long description over the last few years.

disembodied (article with comic) by CSSquirrel (September 2012)
W3C discussion on longdesc/aria-describedat (March 2012)
Longdesc & Other Long Image Description Solutions — Part 1: The Issues by Dennis Lembree (April 2011)
longdesc in HTML5 by @BruceL (March 2011)
Longdesc is dead! Long live Longdesc! by Joshue O Connor (August 2010)
Web Axe Podcast #83: Fate of Longdesc in HTML5 (August 2010)
HTML4 longdesc specification

The Future

Check out the ~~ARIA 1.1 spec for aria-describedat~~ ARIA 1.1 spec for aria-describedat! The aria-describedby attribute is like a combination of longdesc and aria-describedby. I’m pretty excited about this as it seems to provide a method for long description that we can all agree on.