- From: Gregory J. Rosmaita <unagi69@concentric.net>
- Date: Tue, 26 Aug 2003 15:07:48 -0400
- To: Wendy A Chisholm <wendy@w3.org>
- Cc: Web Content Accessiblity Guidelines Mailing List <w3c-wai-gl@w3.org>
aloha, wendy! WC1: In the update for jaws that Roberto sent [1], it says, "You can even use the Dictionary Manager to replace words with sounds or play a sound, as well as change the pronunciation of a word. You can also tell JAWS to always speak a particular word in a particular language. Imagine replacing a left pointing arrow symbol with a sound which plays from the right ear to the left. All this power is available just by selecting the appropriate speech and sounds scheme or by using the more powerful and flexible Dictionary Manager." WC2: in this morning's call [2] we said we would define ascii art as multi-line ascii art, but dash dash greater than is not an emoticon and it is not multi-line ascii art but it is a symbolic representation created out of characters. WC3: so, 2 points :1. is the definition that we agreed on this morning accurate? 2. jaws users are (or will be) able to add common "symbols" to their pronunciation dictionary which answers a question we asked in the call. GJR: a few considerations: 1. cannot ascii art be enclosed in <abbr title="smiley">:)</abbr> -- this would, of course, necessitate that AT developers make expansion of ABBR and ACRONYM available to users, something whose continued non-existence is a cause of much trouble, dismay, despair, and frustration for those of us who have set unambiguous dictionary exceptions in our AT, but who, when a specific use of a homonymic abbreviation or acronym is used, would prefer if the AT scanned the DOM (or scraped the doc source) for expansions and made them available to the user (that is, override pre-set dictionary entries) if that is what the user of the AT wants slash needs slash demands 2. the onus should be on the page author to provide a machine-readable alternative -- foisting responsibility onto individual users does not and should not suffice -- the author MUST be made to make all possible ambiguities unambiguous, and it is the authoring tool or evaluation & repair tool that should encourage authors to do so, whenever one can be recognized 3. many (i'd dare say the majority) of speech-output users have "speak punctuation" either turned off or set at the lowest possible level, so that the flow of whatever he or she is reading isn't interrupted, but indicated in other ways, either through pauses, beeps, audible/tactile symbols, etc., so a lot of ascii art can fall into an individual user's perceptual black hole -- which is why dash-dash-greater than MUST be annotated using some sort of glossing mechanism (hence my suggestion that ABBR be used, for the ascii art is being used as visual shorthand (which, in my once highly-visual mind equals an abbreviation, albeit a semiotic, rather than semantic, abbreviation) -- the dash-dash-greater-than exists for a reason -- to direct a user's attention to a specific phrase, piece of content, or link, and therefore, under the rubric of equality of access to all content, it MUST be annotated, NO exceptions... think of it this way -- if an emoticon adds a crucial element to the understanding of a page and one has punctuation turned off or hasn't yet encountered this combination of punctuation and special characters will it make any noise? of course not, but at least with the use of ABBR, in conjunction with "title", it stands a falling tree's chance... so, i most vigorously object to using the term quote multi-line unquote or incorporating the concept of multiple lines into the definition of ASCII art -- an emoticon or arrow composed of punctuation is as much ASCII art as is the infamous ink-wasting picture of bob dobbs comprised completely of at-signs that circulated widely during the early days of the 'net (check out any of the church of the sub-genius sites, such as http://web.mit.edu/afs/athena.mit.edu/user/d/r/dryfoo/www/SubG/subg.html, or http://www.subgenius.com/ if you aren't familiar with bob's pipe-clenching smile or the entire sub-genius concept) just, my 2 cents:-- actually, probably over a dollar in aggregate, since i've been crying in the wilderness on this point for years, although lately, given my computer & health problems, mostly to myself, gregory. PS: yes, i do enclose ampersands in the ABBR element, as follows: <abbr title="and">&</abbr> PPS: don't expect me to keep up with this thread -- wendy's post popped up as a result of an event queue gone mad, but i'm glad it arbitrarily picked this topic, as it is one on which i have rather strong opinions... PPPS: using a specific screen-reader as a baseline is NOT (bold and emphasize that, jeeves) a good idea, let alone an accessibility threshold -------------------------------------------------------- He that lives on Hope, dies farting -- Benjamin Franklin, Poor Richard's Almanack, 1763 -------------------------------------------------------- Gregory J. Rosmaita <unagi69@concentric.net> WebMaster and Minister of Propaganda, VICUG NYC <http://www.hicom.net/~oedipus/vicug/index.html> --------------------------------------------------------
Received on Tuesday, 26 August 2003 15:07:11 UTC