Re: Eating one's own dog food

Chaals,

         The animations have been lumped with the flicker in lots of 
discussions. Which is why I believed they were considered similarly. My 
error.  I have not been able to duplicate a distraction from animations 
with the children I work with, although I know there are hyperactive 
ADD/ADHD in our population, such children have NOT have distractability 
problems in the lab, and that with the computers very close together so 
that conceivably what is happening on a neighboring screen could even 
distract. Since I teach 400 kids a week, it is quite possible one or more 
children had such a problem but clicked off the offending screen and went 
to something else and I didn't catch it. But, as an overall statement, the 
kids I know to be ADD/ADHD are far less distractible and on task during 
their computer time than during their classroom time.  And just about 
everything the kids use in the lab except Paint or Word has animation. 
Perhaps I am just looking at the difference between the young ADD/ADHD 
person and the adult ADD/ADHD person.

         Some things we could find out: when does distractability occur? 
Upon opening the site? When users try to read the text with the animation 
still going? Does the distractability occur with a single animation? Does 
size matter? Does it help to put it in more white space? How far away from 
the animation should words be? Over 5 space, 10 space, or always down at 
least one line or two?

         Oh, the LD teacher at school is going to look for her copy of the 
"Dyslexic Reading Example" since she still has most of her college papers. 
We went to different schools, separated by twenty-years or so, and she was 
given the exact same example I was ... so I think it will make a good 
example ... I'm still trying to develop a plan for a test for cognitive 
disabilities that will show the need for illustrations ... need to run down 
a copy of the Dolch words and work from that ...
But, it's in the works ....

                                                 Anne




At 07:58 AM 8/23/01 -0400, Charles McCathieNevile wrote:
>This sort of demonstrates why I think it is good to have explicit rationales,
>and probably to have them in the guidelines document. (I used to be against
>having them in the Guidelines documents, preferring to move as much as
>possible to the techniques to keep the "normative reference" short for easier
>reading)
>
>I don't think that (except for flicker) we are concerned about animations
>having any effect on people with photo-sensitive epilepsy. I was under the
>impression that animations can have a very distracting effect for people with
>disabilities that affect their attention to something, and that it was also
>an "until user agents" type problem for some screen-reading software (for
>example Tiflowin, which is a spanish screen reader, apparently froze
>completely if there was an animation).
>
>cheers
>
>Chaals
>
>On Thu, 23 Aug 2001, Anne Pemberton wrote:
>
>   http://www.erols.com/stevepem/Trains/Trains.html - do not visit unless you
>   enjoy animations, trains, or both ... I'm not sure of my point here, except
>   that perhaps we are a bit "overprotective" on the photo-epilepsy issue as
>   it relates to animation (but not flicker).
>
>                                                    Anne

Anne Pemberton
apembert@erols.com

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

Received on Thursday, 23 August 2001 17:00:16 UTC