[WG: Accessibility] help with accessibility for matching questions

[Hedrick Charles]

I'm trying to arrange for all critical and blocker issues that showed in the 2.8 review to be fixed by 2.8 release. One issue is the matching question in Samigo. I'd like a recommendation from people who know how assistive tools are used.

The problem is that current the structure is

A: alternative
B: alternative

[combo box]   1. item 1
[combo box[   2. item 2

When you pull down the combo box, you have to remember the alternatives. The review proposed adding the text of the alternatives invisibly to the combo boxes. 

I suspect they were thinking of the common use where the alternatives are fairly brief text. But there's a full FCK editor available. In theory they could be lengthy text, images, web pages, or anything else. So the question is what to show in the list in the combo boxes? Obvious alernatives:

* repeat the alternatives exactly as is. Screen reader users seem quite adept at cutting off long messages once they've heard enough, so having something long may not be a problem
* produce some kind of textual summary. I'd strip HTML tags, replacing IMG with its alt tag, and OBJECT with its title (I'd probably synthesize ALT and TITLE from the filename/URL if it's missing, but at some point the author has to accept some responsiblity). Optionally truncate it to a reasonable length. (is this desirable?)
* allow the author to supply an optional text description to use in case of the whole FCK box

The first alternative is the easiest and in some sense the safest. But if it's not going solve the problem, I don't want to do it. Can anyone help?

If we do alternative 2, I'll add it to FormattedText, so it can be used by any tool.
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