Maps and Graphs

Andreas,

thank you for your prompt response.

It would be a fantastic start, if you would create & provide one or  
more simple and easy to understand example Maps with separate textual  
descriptions describing why you chose them.

We can then elaborate on potential difficulties that might arise in  
more complex cases, at a later stage. Accessible scripting is a whole  
complex area in itself.

Please consider how users are to find and understand placenames in  
your data without access to the map.

if I understand your concern, perhaps the data could be split into  
categories of importance, such as villages and streets in your  
example. Then within each data set, could the placenames could be  
alphabetical?

regards

Jonathan Chetwynd
Accessibility Consultant on Media Literacy and the Internet



On 29 Jan 2008, at 07:32, Andreas Neumann wrote:


Hello,

I will comment on the maps part only:

>         Maps:
>
> Would it be helpful to recommend that nameplaces are in alphabetical
> order, as in a gazetteer?
> This could be helpful as the order would be understood by many.[7]

the order of labels in a map depends on many factors, and many cases it
can't be alphabetical.

As an example, in a label-placement algorithm you would first place the
more important labels. Once they are placed you would next see if  
some of
the less important labels can fit in without overlapping. If they can't,
they are probably not placed, since they are not that important.

In other cases, the labels may deliberately overlap, but maybe there  
is a
desired, non-alphabetical order, because more important labels are  
placed
on top (further down in the DOM tree) of less important labels.

In any case - wouldn't it be technically much more useful if an
accessibility-aware UA or a map application would do the ordering? It is
technically simple. You can do the alphabetical ordering of map  
labels in
one line of javascript, once they are stored in an array. Many map
applications have alphabetical indizes (like printed atlases).

Andreas

-- 
Andreas Neumann
Böschacherstrasse 6, CH-8624 Grüt/Gossau, Switzerland
Email: a.neumann@carto.net, Web:
* http://www.carto.net/ (Carto and SVG resources)
* http://www.carto.net/neumann/ (personal page)
* http://www.svgopen.org/ (SVG Open Conference)
* http://www.geofoto.ch/ (Georeferenced Photos of Switzerland)

Received on Tuesday, 29 January 2008 09:39:35 UTC