Re: Okay, is this better?

Comments about point 2. Other comments below.  I haven't gone to the 
page under discussion yet. 

LR:  Sorry, I think ASCII art should be deprecated.  You don't know 
which punctuations will or won't be turned on in a particular 
browser/screen reader combination for a particular user.  Repeat 
filters can remove multiple occurences of *identical* characters, but 
your mixture of punctuations goes through without repeat filtering; it 
gets in the way.  I don't mind verbal descriptions in the alt text, 
but since they are spacers, they should be extremely terse.  Even an 
alt text like ". ." would be effective in some situations, causing a 
pause in the speech stream at the horizontal rule.  I don't guarantee 
that ". ." will always work either.

On Wed, 25 Mar 1998 10:59:45 -0500, 
Chris Maden   <crism@ora.com> wrote:

...
>(1) The description "typing pc" is very unclear.  I use Lynx as my
>primary browser, and this was the only thing I didn't understand.
>Maybe "cartoon PC typing on its own keyboard" would be better.
>

LR:  I could dig that.

><img alt="purple line________________________________"> and
><img alt="zig-zag line /\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\"> would
>work well.
>
>(3) Change the background graphic.  It's distracting to me - I'd go
>with something non-textual.  Toning it down may have prevented screen
>readers from trying to read it, but now it's nearly unreadable to the
>sighted, and I spent a little while trying to figure out what it was.
>When it first loaded, I honestly thought it was Hebrew.
>

LR:  If there is text on a page, even in an invisible color, a screen 
reading program will probably read it.  Whether you hear it before or 
after the main foreground text of the page, I don't know, but if the 
browser renders it as text, it will be in the display and 
the off-screen model somewhere.  This is one of the places where 
bitmapped text might actually be useful; we wouldn't have to listen 
to it.

LR:  Don't get me wrong.  If there are pictures or audio clips that I 
am encouraged to download or print to paper or show to sighted 
students, I want them to be labeled with more than a cryptic 
filename.  But many of the decorative devices on web pages are best 
skipped and not described.
 



-- Lloyd Rasmussen
Senior Staff Engineer, Engineering Section
National Library Service for the  Blind and Physically Handicapped
Library of Congress          202-707-0535
(work)       lras@loc.gov    http://www.loc.gov/nls/
(home) lras@sprynet.com http://home.sprynet.com/sprynet/lras/

Received on Wednesday, 25 March 1998 11:43:39 UTC