RE: Textual Images vs. Styled Text

At 07:05 AM 11/29/00 -0800, Anne Pemberton wrote:
>need for illustrations still isn't cemented in

WCAG 1.0 "14.2 Supplement text with graphic or auditory presentations where 
they will facilitate comprehension of the page."
WCAG 2.0 "3.7 Supplement text with graphic or auditory presentations where 
they will facilitate comprehension of the content."

If the "cement" is too watery, then how should we change its composition? 
In 1.0 it's a priority 3 and we have yet to set priorities in 2.0 so 
perhaps what you seek is a higher priority?

Requiring illustrations is *very* unlikely to find much support because 
there is so little evidence that there is an objective standard for 
designing/selecting/integrating them into what is *mostly* signified 
speech. I understand that "language" is neither speech nor its textual 
representation, but those presentations of language are pragmatically 
prevalent. The Bettman Archives are a major resource but "they ain't no 
library".

Perhaps sign language and Bliss symbols or other ideographic forms will 
become more prevalent but neither are so much illustrative as 
communicative. It is commonplace to use words (which is often text) to 
represent pictures but the effective use of pictures is just not codified - 
at least nobody arguing for more graphics has pointed to any objectively 
testable resource that would permit checkable conformance of illustrative 
values.

In my earliest experiences of pedagogy I, like most of my fellows, thought 
I wanted "picture books" but being sort of forced into the less intuitively 
comfortable world of "chapter books" has been very useful. Literacy is 
*not* over-rated. It's not elitism/snobbery/conceit that has made us put so 
much emphasis on text in our guidelines - it's the cumulative experience of 
humankind's move from ideograms to ideophones. Languages for deaf people 
are highly effective but they also require bi-linguality for 
assimilation/inclusion. It's sort of "too bad" that text essentially can 
only be a "graphical" representation of spoken language, but that's what 
we've got.

I would be delighted if there were an *objective* way to make illustrations 
effective rather than just fashionable. The extremely arcane world of the 
RDF people uses graphs extensively and saves a lot of words and hand-waving 
thereby but it's more like math notation than what I think you've been 
meaning by "illustrations".

To make the above cited checkpoints into priority 1s would be IMO 
catastrophic. If we are having trouble with "avoid" and "where possible", 
etc. just imagine the uproar over "where they will facilitate 
comprehension". One person's "facilitation" is another's "barrier". 
Gratuitous "illustrations" are an impediment for many people although we 
can pick our way around them.

In summary until the tool box of authors includes a usable 
thesaurus/dictionary of illustrations I don't believe we can demand their 
use not so much because I personally don't *need* them but because it 
hasn't been convincingly demonstrated how to do it effectively. That's why 
comic books' "methods" are not the lingua franca of civilization, not 
because of ivory-tower-dwelling snobs who think of them as "low-class".

--
Love.
                 ACCESSIBILITY IS RIGHT - NOT PRIVILEGE

Received on Wednesday, 29 November 2000 09:15:20 UTC