Use of Summaries as Meta-Data

At 3:26 PM -0800 11/20/00, William Loughborough wrote:
>At 02:46 PM 11/20/00 -0800, Kynn Bartlett wrote:
>>the use of summaries on a page-by-page basis may be very helpful in 
>>ensuring that people who can't read text easily might be able to 
>>understand what a page is about.
>
>I assume that a "summary" is in "text". How can that be helpful for 
>people who can't read text?

Good question, William!  I set you up for that by being somewhat
vague.  :)

A summary can be useful for someone who can't read text easily
because:

(1) Summaries are usually written to be terse and therefore involve
     _less reading_.

(2) Summaries boil down the complexity of a page and often use simpler
     language than the entire document, and are therefore _easier to
     read_.

(3) Summaries can tell you at a glance what is on a page, without
     having to read the entire document, and so provide _quicker
     orientation_.

(4) Theoretical web browsers can be set to read out the summary of
     a page via voice; this is often easier for determining the
     contents of a page than if the entire document is read out loud,
     especially for longer documents.  (I don't know any assistive
     technology that currently does this, but it seems to me that any
     software written specifically for people with cognitive
     disabilities should incorporate speech synthesis capabilities,
     and this would be a good use of them.)

Keep in mind, William, that I'm thinking of the needs of limited
textual readers as well as complete non-readers, just as it's important
to remember that not everyone who is visually impaired is completely
100% blind.

Summaries (in meta tags, and elsewhere) are very useful to people for
whom reading is quite difficult and/or tedious -- Anne, you're the
expert, so correct me if this is wrong.  My understanding is that a
well-written summary overview for a long document can be very helpful.

--Kynn
-- 
Kynn Bartlett <kynn@idyllmtn.com>
http://www.kynn.com/

Received on Monday, 20 November 2000 18:48:14 UTC