Re: The Core Beliefs of Usability and Their CSS Application

> (if money is involved). If the computer can do it, let it. Let's find
> a way for computers to do the accessibility and portability work for
> us. Expecting the content author so far hasn't been too successful.

Both of these are difficult AI problems as they involve things like
character recognition of deliberately difficult text, deep semantic
understanding of both text and images, combined with a knowledge of
the laws and codes of practice on what can be legally put in real
print (in order to provide summaries of images that are appropriate
in context), etc.

Because web pages are usually, in part, advertisements, they are very
subtle means of communication and it is very difficult to mechanically
extract the intended psychological impact (it can also unacceptable to
the author to explicitly encode this).

Actually, with alternative text, it would be better, from a semantics
point of view to make the text the primary content when the image is
used for text replacement, in which case the AI problem becomes that
of working out the house style and generating appropriate text as
image.

Even if they can be mechanically derived, they still have to be part
of the document standard because they have to go over the wire in
order to work on the old browsers, or on the slow machines that
may be all that is available on a mobile phone or in a poor country.
(Some people argue that accessibility only applies to those that are
considered legally disabled, I consider it about making content available
to as many people as possible.)

Received on Saturday, 2 July 2005 21:46:24 UTC