Re: Illustrating Guidelines

Matt,

    Your basic logic has a serious flaw that is probably contributing to failure to comprehend the similarities I'm presenting...

You said: >MM No, it isn't. Not in the same way alt text is necessary to blind users.
>Without alt text, 100% of blind users will fail to receive information from
>an image. The presence of alt text on an image makes access to data less
>than impossible. The same is not true of illustrations: 100% of the
>cognitively disabled will not fail to receive a document that's not
>illustrated.

First, lets keep both examples in the apple orchard ...

You are correct that without alt text, 100% of blind users will fail to receive information from an image. 

It is equally correct that without graphics, 100% of non-readers will fail to receive information from text ...

Or, we can move to the orange grove ...


100% of blind users will not fail to receive a document whether or not it has alt text.

and

100% of non-readers will not fail to receive a document whether or not is has a graphic.

Do you understand where you err? Or do I need to illustrate the logic?

                        Anne





---
Anne Pemberton
apembert@erols.com
apembert45@yahoo.com
apembert45@lycos.com
apembert@pen.k12.va.us

http://www.erols.com/stevepem
http://www.geocities.com/apembert45

On Fri, 11 May 2001 09:00:25  
 Matt May wrote:
>----- Original Message -----
>From: "Anne Pemberton" <apembert45@lycos.com>
>>     Lisa didn't just find the illustrations "nice", she found they helped
>her more quickly and efficiently process the content. I think that is the
>point you are missing, tho I've no clue why. This is not just about making
>the web "nice", or even "more friendly", tho there are some checkpoints that
>do no more than that already (such as synchronizing scripts).
>
>MM Synchronized text (WCAG1 1.4, WCAG2 1.2) allows deaf users to receive
>pure audio content in multimedia presentations. Synchronized auditory
>descriptions (1.3 in both) allow blind users to receive pure visual content
>in multimedia. Both of these are more than "nice" and "friendly".
>
>> The definition of priorities is that, for P1 priority, it needs to be
>necessary for a substantial number of users. This is the case with graphics
>and multi-media.
>
>MM No, it isn't. Not in the same way alt text is necessary to blind users.
>Without alt text, 100% of blind users will fail to receive information from
>an image. The presence of alt text on an image makes access to data less
>than impossible. The same is not true of illustrations: 100% of the
>cognitively disabled will not fail to receive a document that's not
>illustrated.
>
>P1 compliance doesn't make every web page a utopian paradise for blind
>users, either. All it does is make it less than impossible for everyone to
>receive the ones and zeroes such that their computer can present it to them.
>(This bears repeating: the _computer_, or rather the physical human
>interface device, is the dropoff point for most of the checkpoints. How it
>gets from the HID of the user's choice into his or her brain is not
>something that's easy to quantify.)
>
>What is necessary is the use of _good_ illustration through graphics and
>multimedia, and what is "good" is extremely dependent on the content being
>presented, and -- I'll say it again -- the _people_ who are producing the
>content. The number of people who are capable of creating illustrations,
>audio, motion video, or interactivity is extremely small relative to those
>who can produce text or HTML, and the subset who can do multimedia in a way
>that complements the text is a small fraction of that. You can require
>multimedia all day long, but if they don't have the tools (which are
>expensive) and the skills (which take months to build and years to master),
>what we'll get is a web full of silly, irrelevant clip art someone tacked on
>because we (or a tool like Bobby) said it's "accessible."
>
>I want to see guidelines that can be easily followed without significant
>retooling by content providers, and rules that are proven to increase access
>to people with all disabilities, but _without_ reducing usability for the
>rest of the users of the web. Forcing illustration and multimedia without
>regard to who is providing it or what it's being used for as a P1 is not the
>way to improve accessibility or usability to the web as a whole.
>
>> I'm not sure how "fairly common" it is to browse with images turned off...
>On this list, some folks say they use the web that way, but in my life away
>from this list, NO ONE I KNOW uses the web that way! Just as I don't know
>anyone in real life who uses television without the screen on, or listens to
>anything but music on the radio....
>
>Blind users browse without the help of images, and watch TV without their
>eyes. That's pretty common. There is also a measurable percentage of the web
>who browse without images using Lynx, or by manually turning their images
>off to save download speed.
>
>-
>m
>
>


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Received on Friday, 11 May 2001 15:03:01 UTC