RE: GW Micro Helps Make Macromedia Flash Content Accessible to People Who Are Blind

On Wed, 6 Mar 2002, Charles McCathieNevile wrote:

> ASCII text is not a solution that works. "ASCII art" - using text characters
> and layout to represent graphic content - is an extremely poor choice for
> making graphics that can be presented to users of braille, or people using

wasn't suggesting that it be used for graphics, your right almost no way a
person using a braille or text to speech reader could understand it.

that is where the alt tag is handy

> ASCII only covers the characters used in a handful of languages - it is not
> sufficient to write French, German, Spanish, Italian, Vietnamese, Japanese,
> Greek, Russian, Chinese, Urdu, Arabic, Thai, Mongolian, etc. (It is possible
> to represent those language in ASCII, but very difficult to use and there are
> no standards - french and english speakers have different ways of writing the
> same arabic word, and english speakers have different ways of writing chinese
> words - whereas there are at least widely used standards for including the
> relevant characters in a useful way that are used in modern software).

I was pretty sure there was a text set for most languages, I have seen the
Japanese version

> Text is not something that everyone can use. Ther are commmunities whose

there is no one single method that everyone can use, but there is a single
language that every computer can use and that is ASCII.

> There are a number of screen readers - I know of four for Windows, and at
> least four free ones for Linux, and other products. Some of these things cost
> money (by buying the Windows system itself, which is a couple of hundred US
> dollars, or half the monthly housing cost for an average australian
> family, and perhaps less as part of a computer purchase, you get the not very
> powerful Narrator software). Some peopel will produce free products, some
> will sell their products, and some will be able to buy anything they like,
> others will be constrained by their employer/school/available support.

right, but the screen readers have to have something to read no matter
what OS.

> At least we are moving forwards, although there is still along way to go.

sometimes I really wonder???

Bob
> 
> Just my 2c worth.
> 
> chaals
> 
> On Tue, 5 Mar 2002, Access Systems wrote:
> 
>   HTML or ASCII Text is about as basic and standard as is possible to get
>   and it takes almost nothing to provide.
> 
> 

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Received on Wednesday, 6 March 2002 09:55:15 UTC