- From: Charles McCathieNevile <charles@w3.org>
- Date: Thu, 14 Nov 2002 10:49:57 -0500 (EST)
- To: Jon Hanna <jon@spin.ie>
- cc: <w3c-wai-ig@w3.org>
Well, it is less insane than it might seem, in the sense that it can be made to work. Interpreting visual inforamation as representative of some structure is what sighted people do all the time - so subconsciously in many cases that they forget that is how they operate, and assume that what is important in conveying information is only the visual representation. This is how screen readers worked at the beginning. Now it is more common for them to try and get access to underlying information structure, and more common for the underlying information to have a structure, we expect it to happen all the time and think anything else is crazy. The reality is that anything else is ub-optimal, but perfection is sometimes the enemy of good enough, and by definition people will generally settle for what they consider good enough. It can be made to work like this because people can write or use a style sheet that provides the visual presentation that triggers this kind of behaviour reliably. That's a bit more convoluted than just having an audio style sheet to begin with (and JAWS does have something with the functionality, if not the interoperability, of Audio style sheets in the CSS sense), but it can work. Or people can use a different screen reader - emacspeak provide AudioCSS support, OutSpoken triggers from font characteristics, etc. Playing with different models helps us understand what works well in real conditions. Not playing around with different ideas just means we stagnate... Cheers Chaals On Thu, 14 Nov 2002, Jon Hanna wrote: > >> Actually JAWS 4.5 does support these tags to some degree. The >> user can ask >> for the indicated font of text on a web page by pressing insert+f. Text >> marked with <strong>...</strong> will be indicated as bold. Text marked >> with <em>...</em> will be indicated as italic. > >Am I correct in understanding this as meaning that JAWS indicates an element >not directly linked to visual formatting by telling the user about a >possible visual formatting? > >If so, am I alone in thinking this is insane? > -- Charles McCathieNevile http://www.w3.org/People/Charles tel: +61 409 134 136 SWAD-E http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/Europe ------------ WAI http://www.w3.org/WAI 21 Mitchell street, FOOTSCRAY Vic 3011, Australia fax(fr): +33 4 92 38 78 22 W3C, 2004 Route des Lucioles, 06902 Sophia Antipolis Cedex, France
Received on Thursday, 14 November 2002 10:50:02 UTC