Re: Braille on the QuickTips card?

aloha, max!

i know that i'm a bit of an iconoclast, so i'm going to throw out another non
(although i'm sure there are some who would say "sub") standard idea about the
braille on the QuickTips cards...

first of all, i agree -- we do not, in any way, want the braille to detract
from the legibility of the card itself, so braille on one side it is...

second, i think we can safely discard the http colon slash slash prefix and
just cite the URI as
        www.w3.org/wai
(without the trailing slash, which may cause more confusion for the average
recipient of the card than the lack of the http colon slash slash prefix)

third, i'd advocate discarding capitalization marks altogether -- we are
working with such a limited space that it would be foolish of us to waste
precious real estate on punctuation, so i'm suggesting that the words quote WAI
QuickTips unquote be embossed without any capitalization marks, which will
enable us to keep the words wai quicktips on one line...  the URI should also
be embossed in lowercase, as the URI resolves regardless of case, and -- with
the 2 periods and the slash -- the URI already consists of 14 characters,
providing we drop the dots 1,4 character to symbolize the number three, rather
than using a number sign...  i don't know enough about internationalization to
know whether or not the number sign used in the united states is the same as
that used elsewhere, but i'd imagine that use of a number sign, like so many
other conventions, isn't widely standardized, if at all...   moreover, i'm not
sure that we can fit 14 characters on a QuickTips card, let alone 15 -- hold
on, let me grab one from my near-depleted stack and stick it in the old perkins
brailler...  bad news -- i could only fit 13 characters onto the QuickTips card
(although it took me a couple of tries and a slate and stylus to do so -- the
best i could do with the perkins was 12 characters)

the good news is that, uncapitalized, the phrase wai quicktips is 13 characters
long...

in any event, if we make it clear to anyone who orders or receives the brailled
QuickTips card that computer braille was used to symbolize the number three in
the URI, and put an explanatory note to that effect on the QuickTips page, we
might be able to get away with simply dropping the dots 1,4 character, although
i do realize that the use of a dropped c (which, for you non-braille readers,
is what the dots 1,4 character symbolizes, at least in english) could
potentially cause confusion, especially as most people expect the W3C's URI to
contain the letter c

my sole concern, like yours, max, is that we convey enough information to a
braille reader so that he or she (a) can identify the card, and (b) he or she
can learn the URI for the WAI web space, so that he or she can find out more
about the WAI and the resources and references that it maintains, without
compromising the legibility of the card for the sighted....

to that end, i do think it is important to cite the URI for the WAI's web
space, and not just W3C space, although space considerations may force us to
cite the shorter URI, as i don't believe it would be a good idea to have the
URI span 2 lines

gregory.
--------------------------------------------------------
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, 26 October 1999 11:57:50 UTC