- From: Matt May <mcmay@bestkungfu.com>
- Date: Thu, 10 May 2001 09:52:57 -0700
- To: "William Loughborough" <love26@gorge.net>, <ryladog@earthlink.net>, "3WC WCAG" <w3c-wai-gl@w3.org>, "Anne Pemberton" <apembert@erols.com>
----- Original Message ----- From: "Anne Pemberton" <apembert@erols.com> > I do disagree with you that pictures are less universal than languages. > > Think about any electric or electronic appliance from your washing machine > to a complex computer system. You can write as many words as you want to > indicate what you want the appliance to do, but until a designer reduces > all your words to a picture/s, the circuit boards that control behavior > cannot be manufactured. No image is instantly universal. Even the most basic symbols, including the men and women on bathroom doors, have been subjects of years and years of research. Even the stop sign as used in the US requires alt text. Symbols are heavily dependent on culture and conditioning. And illustrations, when done by the average author, don't often result in anything of substantial value on their own (and almost certainly nothing to approach parity with the written word), because we as a society have not been trained to produce visual messages. > The notion that text is superior to illustrations is a false pride > engendered by a desire to separate users into those worthy of receiving the > message and those who are unworthy. Ther should be no distinctions of > worthiness in accessibility. I will say this: almost as a rule, text without illustration is superior to illustration without text for information density. The exceptions are where the message itself is purely visual in nature, and where designers have worked expertly to communicate their message visually. There is no "politics/religion" in citing text as first among equals for content provision, and it's not a cop-out. We are almost universally trained from birth to communicate near-exclusively by verbal or textual means. Education in spoken and written language and composition is compulsory. The closest most of us get to visual communication training is art class, which often only addresses it by accident. Few people, I'm sure, have done their dissertations in pictures or illustrations. This is why we communicate primarily using text, and why illustrations are often extraordinary. That is to say, all but a tiny fraction of people who have ideas to communicate will do so in text because they are incapable of producing an effective visual that communicates that idea as clearly and unambiguously as written language will afford them. I would argue that in this day and age, this is the barrier to illustration, and this is not something we get to solve. We can't force people to illustrate their ideas when they don't have the skills or tools to do so. We can say "you should try illustrating what you write", and in fact, we already do that in 3.4 ("Use multimedia to illustrate concepts"). However, illustration for illustration's sake as a compliance requirement is counterproductive. There's no "false pride" in this weakness, and certainly no grand conspiracy among providers to "separate" the "unworthy." I think that your stance, Anne, is unnecessarily combative, particularly in this setting, and is generating more heat than light. - m
Received on Thursday, 10 May 2001 12:57:15 UTC