RE: DRAFT: Now with URL included!

Lately, especially when I see the nine meg of  unread mail from this group,
I've thought about sending my unsubscribe note. But the following, copied
from an e-mail I received back in '94 is more appropriate:

"Rabbit's clever," said Pooh thoughtfully.
"Yes," said Piglet. "Rabbit's clever."
"And he has Brain."
"Yes," said Piglet. "Rabbit has Brain."
There was a long silence.
"I suppose," said Pooh, "that's why he never understands anything."

	-----Original Message-----
	From:	love26@gorge.net [SMTP:love26@gorge.net]
	Sent:	Tuesday, June 15, 1999 2:23 PM
	To:	w3c-wai-ig@w3.org
	Subject:	Re: DRAFT:  Now with URL included!

	CH:: "CAST also provides a basic introduction to alternative
	representations for images (alt tags and long descriptions) at:

	http://www.cast.org/strategies/image_barrier.html

	WL: This is good for pix-to-text but much of our recent (seemingly
	endless) discussions have been an effort to make text-to-pix somehow
	become a part of the guidelines.  A site like the above called
	text_barrier.html is IMHO very unlikely to be as clear-cut a
success. I
	cannot yet imagine any way to do this because my brain just doesn't
work
	that way and I've seen no evidence of anything showing how this can
be
	done *WITHOUT A MAJOR CHANGE IN THE ENTIRE LANGUAGE EDUCATION
PROCESS*
	and certainly nothing from a set of vague guidelines: "use
illustrations
	where helpful" sort of urgings.  What illustrations?  A picture of a
	rose means "rose", "spring semester schedule", "Rose", and if there
	aren't a few more, I would be very surprised.  But when the picture
is
	used on a Web page the author should know what she was up to and
	ALT="text" becomes a proper subject for a guideline.  My guess is
that
	it will be decades (if ever) before this can change and when it does
the
	learning process will be just as difficult for folks with learning
	disabilities as it is now for them to learn to read text.  There is
no
	"intuitively obvious" reason why a circle with a diagonal should
mean
	"not" or a stick figure with certain garment styling should signify
a
	particular gender's rest room.  These conventions had to be learned
	laboriously and are far from universal.  We have spent megabytes of
	bandwidth discussing this stuff and the proposals are still so vague
as
	to present authors with no clues as to which set of clip art will
become
	the heiroglyphs of the future.  A football picture can be anything
from
	meaningless to a depiction of a watermelon seed and associating it
with
	the financial statement of the Green Bay Packers has zero
informative
	value for the document in question.  
	-- 
	Love.
	            ACCESSIBILITY IS RIGHT - NOT PRIVILEGE
	http://dicomp.pair.com

Received on Tuesday, 15 June 1999 17:55:39 UTC