- From: Charles McCathieNevile <charles@w3.org>
- Date: Thu, 11 Nov 1999 21:52:09 -0500 (EST)
- To: Bruce Bailey <bbailey@clark.net>
- cc: Kynn Bartlett <kynn@idyllmtn.com>, w3c-wai-ig@w3.org
If you go to an Art Gallery exhibition you can look at pictures. At many galleries you can also get an audio "guided tour" (usually just a cassette tape, but sometimes a real and knowledgeable person). And many exhibitions also have a catalogue, which has pictures of the pictures, and an awful lot of words about the pictures. I think there is a message in that somewhere. I guess it is the same as the one Bruce is describing - Universal access is often surprisingly useful to the people who could survive without it, despite the fact tht it is critical to only a few people (and a particular aspect may equally be completely unusable for an equal number of people - an audio description helps people who cannot see just as much as it excludes people who cannot hear. The goal is to provide the redundancy to cater for both groups, and the benefit spreads to many people in neither group. Charles McCN On Thu, 11 Nov 1999, Bruce Bailey wrote: Kynn, How academic an exercise do you want this be? Most descriptions I have come across (which includes the CAM stuff) is very short and functional -- this include descriptive video. Now, a static web page does not have real time constraints, but aren't most of your friends and colleagues (including those who happen to have vision impairments) interested in why YOU took a particular photo, who is in it, and what were your impressions at the time? Seems to me, only the photographer can answer these questions! Take a look at the ultrasounds I posted for MY friends and relatives. I got good feedback from my friends who are blind, and much to my surprise (I should have predicted this, but I didn't), family who were sighted liked the descriptions too! (They appreciate the help with knowing what they were looking at.) I latter learned that most people did not realize that the ONLY reason I bothered with descriptions (of course I would have included ALT text) was for the benefit of my blind friends! (This also proved to me that _I_ am still learning lessons about the importance of universal access.) Photos can be found at URL: http://www.clark.net/pub/bbailey/baby-21apr99.html A picture may be worth a thousand words, but sometimes it is nice if someone tells you -- Just what the Hell is that? -- Bruce Bailey Kynn Bartlett wrote: > Accurately describing picture content is necessary for accessibility > considerations, especially LONGDESC/D-Link. However, giving good > and useful picture descriptions is not as easy as it sounds; there > is a certain art to it, and you can improve with practice. > > I recently went on a trip to Rome to speak at the E-Commerce > Summit (http://www.e-commerce-summit.com/) and the day before > the summit started, I went on a commercial tour of Rome and took > many pictures of what I was seeing. I would like to make these > available on the web, and, as a practice exercise, I'd like to see > if anyone (who can see my pictures) would be interested in helping > to describe these pictures or at least evaluating the descriptions > that I or someone else has provided. --Charles McCathieNevile mailto:charles@w3.org phone: +1 617 258 0992 http://www.w3.org/People/Charles W3C Web Accessibility Initiative http://www.w3.org/WAI MIT/LCS - 545 Technology sq., Cambridge MA, 02139, USA
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