Re: wave file as alt tag?

At 02:18 PM 5/16/99 +0200, Peter Meijer wrote:
>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
>

Yes, technically, the sound that is attached to the flag icon could be the
sonification of the image.  But this would be a triumph of technology over
communication.

In popular culture this image already has an associated sound.  The sound
for the image of a waving stars and stripes is that of Arthur Fiedler
conducting the Boston Pops in Sousa's "Stars and Stripes Forever" on the
Esplanade on the Fourth of July.

For inclusion of the reading-impaired, it is important to honor the
associations of sight, sound and text that already exist as cliches in the
lexicon of popular culture.

Al


>   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 Monday, 17 May 1999 09:16:08 UTC