Re: Wordle worthwhile to accessify?

Quoth Harry Loots at 2008-10-16 22:12...
> I will definitely not be using wordle on any of the websites that i am
> directly involved in or have any say in, until feinberg provides an equivalent
> content for people who are unable to make sense of the visual version. 

But why use Wordle at all if it doesn't behave as required?  The
functionality would not be very difficult to duplicate.

I have been looking at the production of accessible Tag Clouds/Tag
Wedges for a while now[1].  I started off using an XHTML/CSS rendering
but have since considered what to do when a raster graphic output format
is a requirement.  This would be achieved by first rendering the output
as SVG, then use readily available, Open Source tools to convert to
JPEG/PNG, etc  OR to XHTML+CSS.  XSLT is your friend...

Recent work for a client on an XHTML/CSS version has an option to render
statistics in the code - much like Tanguy's example although my code
displays frequencies rather than percentages.

Although the article I have referenced talks about PHP, my regular work
is in Perl.  'Fancy' graphics stuff would be achieved using GD or
ImageMagick.  I feel that running the creation/rendering server-side can
only make the application more accessible as it requires less of the
client end - and could indeed even work in a text user agent such as
Lynx (output graphics would be downloadable.)

Cheers

M

REFERENCES

1 - <http://www.smiffysplace.com/accessible-tag-clouds>


-- 
Matthew Smith
Smiffytech - Technology Consulting & Web Application Development
Business: http://www.smiffytech.com/
Personal: http://www.smiffysplace.com/
LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/smiffy

Received on Thursday, 16 October 2008 22:57:20 UTC