Accessible Art Online at Tage Gallery

This is worth a look.  The Tate Gallery in London has developed a resource
designed to help people who are blind or visually impaired learn about works
by two major 20th-century artists, Picasso and Matisse.  There are two
versions of the resource: one uses text and Flash animation, while the other
uses text plus downloadable raised drawings.

The Flash animation provides keyboard support: "f" for forward, "d" for back
(don't know why they didn't use "b"!), "k" to zoom in (for a closer looK, I
guess)-- and "j" to jump out of the Flash movie and back to the orientation
text.  Smart; I've got Flash 6 installed, so would like to hear how it works
with Flash 5.

It's not quite as seamless as I'd like it to be (in the wildest dreams
department).  The resource has three frames, and the "title" frame includes
too much information for my taste: Artist's name, title of work, museum
cataloguing information, all of which you have to hear each time you step
forward or back in the animation.  Also, there's no skip-navigation link on
the pages that get you here, so again you have to wade through a lot of
extra stuff before you get to the heart of the page.

There are some glitches with the raised images, too.  The instructions at
http://www.tate.org.uk/imap/pages/raised.htm
<http://www.tate.org.uk/imap/pages/raised.htm>  provide a link  that says,
"Click here to open and save the PDF document that contains all the raised
drawings."  In other words, all the drawings are in a single PDF document.
It loads slowly (JAWS reported "Error loading document" several times before
it finally loaded), and for reasons I don't understand the "Save" and "Save
as..." options in Internet Explorer were reported as "not available," i.e.,
grayed out.  So I can't in fact save the file; all I can do is print it--
and that seems to be taking forever.

Of course PDF documents can't do "raised images" on their own, and certainly
my LaserJet can't produce them; but there are no instructions on the Tate
site about how to get the images produced in a raised format.  I presume you
have to print them, then find someone with a Reprtronics or some other
device that can handle the process.

But I'm impressed!  And I've sent these comments to the Tate as well; I'll
let you know what, if anything, I hear back.



John Slatin, Ph.D.
Director, Institute for Technology & Learning
University of Texas at Austin
FAC 248C, Mail code G9600
Austin, TX 78712
ph 512-495-4288, f 512-495-4524
email jslatin@mail.utexas.edu
web http://www.ital.utexas.edu <http://www.ital.utexas.edu> 
 


-----Original Message-----
From: Kathy Blackburn [mailto:kblackbn@austin.rr.com
<mailto:kblackbn@austin.rr.com> ] 
Sent: Wednesday, July 31, 2002 8:11 pm
To: adinternational@yahoogroups.com
Subject: Article: Tate Gallery offers online resource for visually impaired
people


Ananova:

Tate offers online art resource for visually-impaired people

The Tate gallery has launched a comprehensive online resource for visually
impaired people.

I-map offers an interactive examination on the key concepts of modern art by
focusing on selected works by Matisse and Picasso.

The service
http://www.tate.org.uk/imap/ <http://www.tate.org.uk/imap/> 
incorporates text, image enhancement and animations to study the different
themes in fine detail.

But the integral element rests with the opportunity to print raised images
from specially-formatted files.

Tate director Sir Nicholas Serota said the site showed the Tate's commitment
to insuring its collection is accessible to everyone.

He said: "I hope i-Map will encourage more blind and partially-sighted
people to experience the Tate Collection both online and in the galleries."

The launch has been timed to coincide with its Picasso Matisse exhibition,
but will be a permanent feature of the Tate.org.uk website.

There are already plans to include works by other artists.

Story filed: 15:41 Tuesday 30th July 2002
 The website has PDF files of the images.  I assume you're supposed to print
these out on capsule paper and run them through a stereocopy machine to
raise the picture.

Kathy Blackburn
kblackbn@austin.rr.com


John Slatin, Ph.D.
Director, Institute for Technology & Learning
University of Texas at Austin
FAC 248C, Mail code G9600
Austin, TX 78712
ph 512-495-4288, f 512-495-4524
email jslatin@mail.utexas.edu <mailto:jslatin@mail.utexas.edu> 
web http://www.ital.utexas.edu <http://www.ital.utexas.edu>