Accessible Graphics

I enjoyed your "Break This Page" discussion of accessible graphics.  There
is a fundamental limitation to the alt and longdesc tag methods however.
For many graphics, a picture is worth a great deal more than a thousand
words.  For example, just try to describe a US map in words that provide
the reader approximately the same information as the map.  Can be done, but
it would take weeks to read it.

We have a discussion of "accessible object-oriented graphics" at
http://dots.physics.orst.edu/graphics.html
that you might enjoy.  We have linked some examples of our preliminary
research efforts to go one step, maybe several steps, better than word
descriptions.  I would be pleased to hear reactions.

John Gardner
Science Access project
Oregon State University

Received on Wednesday, 10 March 1999 19:00:19 UTC