conversion to picture only [was 3 points about Text free (<30 words) sites

Jonathan,

I'm think I'm finally catching on to your point of view here.  Please tell
me what you think of the following.

Lets say we have a web page that is a catalog of products.  There is a
picture of each product, and next to each product there is a textual
description and a price.

One way for a person who doesn't read to use the site is to use software
that reads the description and the price in synthetic speech. I'm thinking
here of software for people who see but who have reading disabilities.  So
if he wanted to hear the price, he'd have to highlight all the text near
the picture and listen till he heard the price.

Now one could also imagine a tool that would eliminate all the text from
the screen.  It would replace the descriptions with icons and the prices
with other icons.  

That way the user would not see any text on the screen, and would not have
to fiture out what text to select.   He'd look at the pictures for the
product he wanted and click on the "description" icon or the "price" icon.

Is this the kind of conversion you were thinking of?  How helpful do you
think it would be?

--------------
As for implementation: in principle this could be done with existing
browsers and streaming audio or even wav files.  But it would be better to
have text to speech built into the browser or a brower plugin, to get a
faster response and lower data rates.

Len





-------
Leonard R. Kasday, Ph.D.
Universal Design Engineer, Institute on Disabilities/UAP, and
Adjunct Professor, Electrical Engineering
Temple University

Ritter Hall Annex, Room 423, Philadelphia, PA 19122
kasday@acm.org        
(215} 204-2247 (voice)
(800) 750-7428 (TTY)

Received on Sunday, 14 March 1999 12:37:55 UTC