RE: Cognitive Disabilities

Hello Jonathan,
Well I'm strongly in agreement that we need to consider images in new ways.

You write,
Sadly peepo is very nearly a lone voice in the area of providing a W3C 
accessible virtual space, even though in a very limited sense. However there
are many excellent VRML, flash and other attempts. 
Accessible SVG is also an extremely rare commodity :-(
to resolve the red bus problem will also require excellent and 
transparent authoring tools.

...

People with SLD simply don't generalise or abstract in the 
way described, one might go so far as to say that this is one 
definition of a LD. Naturally if we could find an abstract pointer the 
issue would be resolved, but we can't. So this leads to much confusion, 
little of which is resolved by text based discussion.

Doyle,
This remark reminds me that with visual dyslexia some people can have a
great deal of trouble with seeing depth in the landscape.  So the
integrative part of seeing 'wholeness' is a difficulty for them.

Jonathan,
It would be great if you could illustrate some of your discussion.

Doyle,
I shot a video of walking on a hillside with a dyslexic person.  They had
trouble with navigating the hillside compared to me, and had to stare at the
ground as we walked.  I think this gives us a variety of entry points to
consider accessibility and imagery.

If we constructed something on line one could carry a laptop into the fields
where a disabled person might go for a walk and make that usable for the
dyslexic person outdoors.

I'll describe what I think are important features of images used in the real
world.  We need to do the equivalent of googling the frames of images so we
can pull up a relevant section of images when needed while walking.  That
also requires some degree of not just geographic notation that identifies a
spot, but also orientation of the body in space.  

One can project a movie onto the landscape, but in many ways putting a movie
directly on top of the world masks what is in the world.  So I would prefer
to have standard means of attaching a movie to the landscape to the side of
what I am looking at.  Or to be able to see through an image into the real
landscape so that the ambiguity between landscape and image are not
confusing me. 

Another way I could illustrate this would be to take a blind from birth
person who hasn't learned certain visual orientations in the world and I
would put the blind person into a parking lot (a common trial for blind
people trying to navigate in the world, but a learning disabled person faces
similar problems) and I would make websites for them to navigate
interactively in the parking lot.  What I am trying to learn there is how a
blind person learns the landscape without experience seeing landscapes.  And
how that would translate into using a image based website that could be
accessible in that sort of way.

Another way I would consider making illustrations is with eye tracking
devices that can give a better sense of attention structure that some
individual brings to a given set of data.  When one is in the world with for
example some form of attention deficit, that the imagery is not enough but
how can that imagery be used by the person.

So I think there are several areas to explore this way.

1. Linking the imagery to a specific space,

2. Addressing the imagery ambiguity between the image and real space.  

3. Finding the imagery when needed in real time.

4. Customizing imagery for the attention structure of a given person.

All of this could be put on line as a starting place for doing further work.
Doyle 






Doyle Saylor 
Business Systems Consultant 
Intranet Hosting Services 
Wells Fargo Services Corporation 
 


-----Original Message-----
From: Jonathan Chetwynd [mailto:j.chetwynd@btinternet.com] 
Sent: Wednesday, May 28, 2003 2:32 AM
To: saylordj@WellsFargo.COM
Cc: w3c-wai-eo@w3.org
Subject: Re: Cognitive Disabilities

Doyle,

whilst this snippet* is still text it has the additional benefit that 
it is rendered as a specific representation that maybe tested.
It would be great if you could illustrate some of your discussion.

Doyle wrote:
We don't want an icon in my view to look like an object we want an icon 
to
stick to a sparrow in such a way that it touches all birds and we know 
that.
That is what written words do.  They stick to an object they don't 
resemble
the object.  That resolves what you referred to in the example of the 
red
bus and green bus, is the connectedness issue between expressions such 
that
the green and red refer to the same bus.

Unfortunately this is the nub of the issue, and it is far from 
resolution. People with SLD simply don't generalise or abstract in the 
way described, one might go so far as to say that this is one 
definition of a LD. Naturally if we could find an abstract pointer the 
issue would be resolved, but we can't. So this leads to much confusion, 
little of which is resolved by text based discussion.

Doyle wrote: We want to build in a connection process.

Reality fortunately has many useful pointers, loo signs for instance. 
However these are currently missing in virtuality, and so for the 
present it is necessary to augment virtuality, before it will help 
augment reality, the HUD has to highlight the pylon before the pilot 
can avoid it.

Sadly peepo is very nearly a lone voice in the area of providing a W3C 
accessible virtual space, even though in a very limited sense.
However there are many excellent VRML, flash and other attempts. 
Accessible SVG is also an extremely rare commodity :-(
to resolve the red bus problem will also require excellent and 
transparent authoring tools.

Perhaps we can use your expertise to create some other useful visual 
examples with SVG.

Jonathan


*below, please not I've had problems rotating as well as translating, 
if anyone has a better one thanks:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="iso-8859-1"?>
<!DOCTYPE svg PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD SVG 20001102//EN" 
"http://www.w3.org/TR/2000/CR-SVG-20001102/DTD/svg-20001102.dtd">
<svg>
<title>circleanimation.svg</title>
                <circle id="circle2" 
style="stroke-width:5;stroke:blue;fill:none" cx="60" cy="60" r="60">
     <animate attributeName="cx" values="0;1400" dur="3s"
              repeatCount="indefinite"
              onrepeat="advance(evt)"/>
             </circle>
</svg>

Received on Wednesday, 28 May 2003 13:03:27 UTC