A rarely used accessibility feature in HTML is the longdesc attribute on the img element. It allows you to enter a URL for a page that contains a longer description of the image than is suitable for the alt attribute.

One of the reasons that longdesc is not used a lot is likely lack of support in visual browsers. iCab has supported it for years, but that used to be the only one as far as I am aware.

However, now there is at least one more browser that supports longdesc: Opera. Henny Swan talks more about how it works in Adding Londesc support to Opera 10.10.

If this will make more people use the longdesc attribute (and use it right) remains to be seen, of course.

Posted in Accessibility, Browsers.