RE: Survey: Emoticons for screen readers

it's not a question of whether or not you, or i, or anyone else, finds a 
particular usage quote annoying and unprofessional unquote -- emoticons and 
other instances of visually-oriented cyber-saccharine exist...  and it's 
not just the cyber-saccharine and the pop-up emasculated image-only browser 
instances that pop-up at commercial sites to offer you special promotions 
or draw your attention to a specific topic or feature, either -- there's an 
old saying that a blind man's poison is another man's food -- ever, 
perchance attempt to verify WHOIS information via the Network Solutions web 
site with graphics turned off?  you can't, because in order to do so, one 
must type into an edit field the numbers contained in an un-ALT texted and 
un-titled image -- for security purposes, one presumes, although i wonder 
why it never occurred to them to use https AND provide ALT text for the 
graphic...

so, it doesn't matter if you or i or anyone else think emoticons are dumb, 
give a damn, would ever use 'em, etc. -- THEY EXIST and:

1) they are graphical in nature
2) they are intended to convey content -- unambiguous content at that -- 
what's less ambiguous than an author telling you to "smile", take the 
following or preceding with a grain of salt, or just screaming at the user 
LOOK HERE

it is content, hence, WCAG must provide proper use guidance, and the only 
way to make 'em accessible is to use either ABBR in the HTML/XHTML world or 
Ruby in a better world than that in which i live -- that's the world where 
my computer works and i spend all day in the electronic scriptorium using 
ruby to gloss ebooks so that you can get as much or as little of the 
marginalia as you, the individual user desire, including NONE AT ALL!

what of all the books that have entered museum and library collections, not 
to mention those in monastery archives and the like, which contain the 
marginalia of a thousand readers -- you could buy an ebook of shakespeare 
and have overlays that allowed you to see how anyone who has annotated it, 
did annotate it -- or not, just as you could use SMIL to link the text to a 
definitive performance, or just as you could litter a scholarly work with 
footnotes, have 'em auto-inserted into the text with an earcon to indicate 
the beginning and end, or just suppress them if you happen to believe, as i 
do, that the conquest of new mexico makes a ripping good yarn, although it 
would be nice to have the original (in spanish) along with on-user-demand 
available glosses into the major translations of the work

just adding another 2 cents to my long-outstanding bill, gregory.

ORIGINAL MESSAGE
>To answer the question about the purpose of this survey - we want to find
>out if emoticons pose significant access barriers or not. If they do, we
>need to write techniques about them. If they are merely annoying and
>unprofessional, we don't need techniques (they'd be outside the
>accessibility scope). It is a spin-off of a discussion of ASCII art, which,
>though less commonly used these days, can be quite problematic if a screen
>reader encounteres it and starts reading a whole bunch of nonsense. We
>wanted to see if emoticons fell into that category or if, as short as they
>are, they're not such a big problem.
>
>Michael

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ABSURDITY, n.  A statement or belief manifestly inconsistent with
one's own opinion.       -- Ambrose Bierce, _The Devils' Dictionary_
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          Gregory J. Rosmaita, <unagi69@concentric.net>
Camera Obscura:             http://www.hicom.net/~oedipus/index.html
VICUG NYC:            http://www.hicom.net/~oedipus/vicug/index.html
Read 'Em & Speak:     http://www.hicom.net/~oedipus/books/index.html
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Received on Wednesday, 3 September 2003 14:18:03 UTC