Re: Please Help me understand

We all without exception like what we know.
academic types (not being personal) like lots of text.

That one is fairly clear, though I expect some members object.

Text readers as far as I know present a voice unknown, this can be
unpleasant and thus hard to comprehend.

The flow of the text may not suit the listeners ability.
I have on many occassions recommended the use of a meta tag to indicate
difficulty ogf comprehension.
Many members commented on how awful sentence parsers are.
The fact is they are better than nothing.

Years ago I built a small spider in Visual Basic, it checked for things like
the number of pictures per page, I soon realised that the first thing it
needed to do was reject sites that had more than 30 words per page.
Thousands of pages later I tried something else.

Unfortunately even this tack is wrong because good stories when read well
are long and understandable.

It aint a simple problem, and insisting on universal solutions is not
helping authors meet this huge need.

jay@peepo.com

Jonathan Chetwynd
special needs teacher and
web accessibility consultant.
----- Original Message -----
From: Marti <marti47@MEDIAONE.NET>
To: Anne Pemberton <apembert@crosslink.net>
Cc: Web Content Accessiblity Guidelines Mailing List <w3c-wai-gl@w3.org>
Sent: Friday, March 17, 2000 12:04 PM
Subject: Please Help me understand


> While I would certainly never argue that graphics are not an important
part
> of the web experience, after following this discussion for several days I
> still don't understand why those who have difficulty with reading can't
use
> the same tools to have text read to them that the visually impaired use.
> While this does not address the needs of all, it would seem that at least
> those that cannot read (dyslexic?, illiterate?) would benifit from having
> the text read aloud, including the alt attribute for graphics especially
> where those graphics are pictures of words.
> As for the use of some 'symbolic' communication I wonder if the
appropriate
> way to address this isn't with user software. The visually impaired employ
a
> screen reader, Braille display, or whatever of their choice to translate
> screen text into a useable format for them. Perhaps user end software
could
> be developed to translate that same text into a useable format for other
> disabilities?
> Marti
>
>
>

Received on Friday, 17 March 2000 08:57:50 UTC