Re: Text equivalents

aloha, anne!

while you made several salient and valuable points in your initial post and 
your reply to william, the page which you referenced in your reply to william:
http://www.ih.k12.oh.us/ps/americana/Eberle/EBsongs.htm

is a poor example for several reasons:

1. there is no prior indication that following a link will load a WAV file 
-- why don't the pages point to transcriptions of the songs, which contain 
a link which is clearly marked as referencing an audio clip (additional 
information that would be useful would be the format of the audio file, as 
well as the file size and approximate playing time) -- in that wise, a 
child who is deaf or who is using a computer without a sound card (or 
support for the proprietary format) could obtain the same information that 
other children ostensively obtain when they listen to the audio 
clips...  this is also true of the link whose hyperlink text is "The 
Star-Spangled Banner" -- there is nothing about the link (save for the 
HREF) which identifies it as linking to a WAV file

2. there are no textual equivalents for the songs (i.e. transcripts of the 
songs for those who cannot hear the WAV files)

3. the names of the persons whose pictures appear on the page are only 
visually slash spatially associated with the pictures, and there are no 
explicit captions associated with them, so unless you can see them rendered 
exactly the way the designer of the page intended them to be rendered 
(using a TABLE for layout purposes), they are actually quite useless...  if 
you doubt the validity of that last claim, try, for example, viewing the 
page with Lynx, and you will see how easily a Lynx user might mis-interpret 
the pseudo-caption as referring to the Lynx-generated placeholder, [LINK], 
which follows most of the names when the table is linearized..   there are 
several ways that a stronger, more explicit association could have been 
defined for the graphic and its caption -- many of which are included in 
the WCAG techniques document

4. none of the graphical hyperlinks on the page utilize ALT text, nor do 
they provide LONGDESCs or D-links to describe the images (a blind or 
deafblind child might, for example, want to know what george washington or 
susan b. anthony looked like)

gregory

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He that lives on Hope, dies farting
      -- Benjamin Franklin, Poor Richard's Almanack, 1763
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Gregory J. Rosmaita <unagi69@concentric.net>
    WebMaster and Minister of Propaganda, VICUG NYC
         <http://www.hicom.net/~oedipus/vicug/index.html>
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Received on Tuesday, 14 March 2000 19:20:31 UTC