RE: Textual Images vs. Styled Text

At 06:14 AM 11/29/00 -0800, William Loughborough wrote:
>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? 

A small change in the wording would help: Supplement text with graphic or
auditory presentations TO facilitate comprehension of the content. That
elminates a choice by the author whether or not to illustrate.

>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?

If priority is based on numbers of people who will/can be served by a
guidelines, then this needs to be the highest priority. The number of
people who will be served by this inclusion in the guidelines is greater
than the number served by the never-ending discussion of text in graphics. 

>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. 

This argument has been given here before on the issues, and I tend to think
it's a smokescreen. As I've said before, such "standards" do exist, in
children's books and textbooks if nowhere else (tho I suspect some picture
magazines have a "standard" they use, cookbooks often contain
illustrations, and the many "coffee table" books provide exellent
"standards" to explore.

Illustrations can include a variety of graphic forms from simple line art
to detailed photos. Size would be a useful standard ... detailed photos
should be presented in a small form on the page, with the capacity to click
to a full-sized image. That means the page author needs two versions of
each detailed photo for each page. That is measurable. That standard could
even invoke one of those deprecated clauses "until user agents" allow size
management of graphics as well as text, the two images are needed. But the
most important "standard" is that there be graphics THAT ILLUSTRATE THE
CONTENT for every "document" or HTML page... 

	In order to actually set standards, we need outside help from the world of
illustrators. They, not us, can detail what and how to tackle this problem.
And, they can probably set up some means of measuring that this has been
accomplished. I won't promise that a machine can make that determination,
but a human user can. We are designing the web for human users.

>Perhaps sign language and Bliss symbols or other ideographic forms will 
>become more prevalent but neither are so much illustrative as 
>communicative.

Yes, they are communicative. I am not referring to sign or symbolic
language when I talk about illustrations. 

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.

All illustrations will have alt tags, some will have descriptions.
Documents have metadata that include Keywords for the page/site, and text
has Mark-Up. All of these can be measured (by machines, even) to see that
all points in meta data have been illustrated as determined by the presence
of the metadata terms in the alt tags and descriptions. 

Rather than pushing this issue aside because the current group is unable to
make it whole, lets find the folks who can, and invite their input. 

				Anne



>
>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
>
>
Anne L. Pemberton
http://www.pen.k12.va.us/Pav/Academy1
http://www.erols.com/stevepem/Homeschooling
apembert@crosslink.net
Enabling Support Foundation
http://www.enabling.org

Received on Wednesday, 29 November 2000 17:09:33 UTC