Re: wave file as alt tag?

Technically this should be quite feasible. For instance, 
if an image of the American flag is showing with something
like Alt="Stars and stripes" in the HTML IMG tag, a blind
user might at the same time hear a "wav tag" of "wave file
as alt tag" like (88K file size)

   http://www.seeingwithsound.com/extra/usflag.wav

which is the sound generated from and corresponding to the
usflag.bmp example image that can be downloaded from

   http://www.seeingwithsound.com/extra/usflag.zip

For bandwidth efficiency, for guaranteeing mutual consistency
between image and sound, and to avoid adding a burden on any
website developer, one would want this sound rendering done 
automatically on the client computer, based on the original 
image that the IMG tag was referring to.

Linking a browser to a third-party add-on for the image based
sound rendering would do the job. The browser would only have
to pass on the image data when the user indicates he/she wants
to analyze the audible counterpart of an image, perhaps zoom 
into it, hear it in inverse video, hear it line by line, apply
OCR, or whatever else may help with understanding the content
of the image through sound. All the necessary ingredients except
for the browser link are already available.

Best wishes,

Peter Meijer


Soundscapes from The vOICe - Seeing with your Ears!
http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/Peter_Meijer/

Received on Sunday, 16 May 1999 08:08:39 UTC