Re: media mix and universal connectedness

William,

Earlier today I put images of the new flag lapel ribbon on my web page to 
show connectedness with the horrible events this week, and I haven't 
uploaded the, partly because we had company all afternoon, but mostly 
because I haven't been able to decide what alt tag to put on them.

It I write a bunch of text as e-mail, well, that's e-mail .... but if I 
write a bunch of text for the web, writing the text is just the beginning 
of the task ... a web document isn't finished when you just write a bunch 
of interesting text ...

At 07:48 AM 9/16/01 -0700, William Loughborough wrote:
>At 09:06 AM 9/16/01 -0400, Anne Pemberton wrote:
>>Provide image equivalents for text
>
>A question remains not so much about whether this can even be done - for 
>example the instant sentence might have as its "image equivalent" some 
>depiction of an author pasting an "appropriate" image next to the words 
>"provide image..." - but more as to whether authors can be expected to be 
>able to do that. I could not do it effectively. Am I therefore excluded 
>from the game?

What is the game? Communicating with the widest range of folks? Or 
communicating with those who are like you? If your web topic is 
accessibility for folks with disabilities and you know there are folks with 
disabilities who cannot understand you if you just write text, what do you 
do?  ..... You need to make a decision on how urgently you feel the need to 
extend your message to those who can't just read your text?

         William, for you, going past text is a chore .... for me, it's the 
fun part of creating a web page .... When I look at http://www.peepo.com/ I 
am often befuddled what to click on, but if I study it, as a poor reader 
must do to text, I can get the meaning .... Less extreme than Jonathan's 
site, is  http://www.meldrethmanor.com/  a site by and for students who 
have disabilities that include not doing well with text ...

>I can write some text, as I am now doing here, but I have neither 
>time/skill/talent to "provide image equivalent" for this very text. If I 
>put this email exchange on a Web site about the problems of complying with 
>guidelines, I could not comply with this guideline therein.The notion that 
>this can be expected/required/done is IMO totally vain.
>
>In my heart/mind I know that such multi-modal reinforcements of messages 
>would mostly work IF DONE APPROPRIATELY, but I cannot do it. Just the 
>simplistic effort at
>http://rdf.pair.com/xguide.htm
>(wherein I used "free icons" and sound snippets) was a major undertaking 
>for what seems a trivial result.

There were many illustrative features of your site ... especially putting 
the four guidelines in four quadrants of the screen .... that in and of 
itself made the guidelines much more comprehensible to me when you did it ....

The first illustrated (and instructional) web site I did was the Five Forks 
(which I can no longer update and it is unfinished) at 
http://www.pen.k12.va.us/Pav/Academy1/fiveforks ... the process was to do 
the research, find available pictures from the Library of Congress, etc., 
then write the text .... to match the available resources ....

>Do the icons or earcons help? I dunno. They certainly aren't "image 
>equivalents for text", they merely decorate, hopefully evocatively.
>To conform to the proposed checkpoint I would have to become someone I am 
>currently not and I would thereby be prohibited from "eating my own dog 
>food" insofar as putting a conformance logo on this page.

Put aside the checkpoint issue, and ask yourself what is there for someone 
who can't get much out of the text on your page?

I spent a the school year last year consistently using the terms "keyboard" 
and "mouse" with the kindergartners, but when I tested them at the end of 
the year, some children persisted in calling them the "typer" and the 
"clicker" ... so this year I'm using a song 
http://www.geocities.com/apembert45/Music/LittleComputer.html  .... will it 
help the Kindergartners learn keyboard and mouse better than just talk last 
year? I'll know in May ...

                                         Anne

>--
>Love.
>EACH UN-INDEXED/ANNOTATED WEB POSTING WE MAKE IS TESTAMENT TO OUR HYPOCRISY

PS: Each email I make without illustrative content would likewise make me a 
hypocrite .... but e-mail is not a web page ....

                                                 Anne



Anne Pemberton
apembert@erols.com

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