Icons, Symbols and Cognitive Disabilities

Guide­line 1.3 Cre­ate con­tent that can be pre­sented in dif­fer­ent ways (for exam­ple spo­ken aloud, sim­pler lay­out, etc.) with­out los­ing infor­ma­tion or structure

Draft Guide­line 1.3 of the Web Con­tent Acces­si­bil­ity Guide­lines 2.0 dis­cusses the impor­tance of mak­ing infor­ma­tion avail­able in a form that can be per­ceived by the user– either directly or through an assis­tive tech­nol­ogy. For exam­ple, if a site uses an image to con­vey mean­ing, then the alt text should be present so that it can be seen (in a text-only envi­ron­ment), heard (by a screen reader) or even felt (through a refre­sh­able braille dis­play). This per­tains to both pre­sen­ta­tion and structure.

The tech­nolo­gies men­tioned above– text-only browsers, screen read­ers and elec­tronic braille– all do a good job at pre­sent­ing infor­ma­tion to the appro­pri­ate audi­ence. How­ever, what about users with cog­ni­tive dis­abil­i­ties? Text read aloud may be help­ful in some sit­u­a­tions, but what about a graph­i­cal rep­re­sen­ta­tion of con­tent? There are already some efforts in this area with the Com­mu­ni­cate: Web­wide sym­bol sup­ported browser that claims to be able to rep­re­sent over 29,000 words with sym­bols and while I applaud their efforts, with a Windows-only, pro­pri­etary, subscription-based prod­uct, I doubt there will be any wide­spread adop­tion in the near future.

Per­haps one day there will be an open sys­tem that will facil­i­tate the col­lec­tion and use of sym­bols in every­day tools. Until then, here are some other project/ideas that are explor­ing the use of symbols:

• Merriam-Webster Visual Dic­tio­nary
  Over 6,000 images orga­nized hier­ar­chi­cally under 15 major themes
  
• Zlango Over 200 icons divided into 8 major cat­e­gories devel­oped for use on mobile devices. Read Romeo and Juliet in Zlango speak.
  
• sosym­bol There isn’t a lot of infor­ma­tion on this site, but they do have a col­lec­tion of stan­dard­ized icons and you can con­tribute your own using their online sym­bol cre­ator after you have logged in.
  
• Icon­finder Icon search engine
• Sym­bol Signs from the AIGA 50 freely avail­able passenger/pedestrian symbols.
• Symbols.com Sim­ple sym­bols for a num­ber of words.

Does your mail client support email standards?

Email Stan­dards Project

The Email Stan­dards Project works with email client devel­op­ers and the design com­mu­nity to improve web stan­dards sup­port and acces­si­bil­ity in email.

Online Video Captions

Google, Microsoft, Yahoo and AOL have announced their par­tic­i­pa­tion in the Inter­net Cap­tion­ing Forum (ICF) estab­lished to pro­mote the use of cap­tion­ing for online video. They will be work­ing with the National Cen­ter for Acces­si­ble Media (NCAM) at WGBH Boston. You can read quotes from Vint Cerf and other rep­re­sen­ta­tives from each of the big four at the National Cen­ter for Tech­nol­ogy Inno­va­tion regard­ing the effort.

I am nei­ther deaf or hard or hear­ing, but the cap­tions are almost always on when the tele­vi­sion is on in our home. I enjoy the view­ing expe­ri­ence and miss fewer words mum­bled here and there when I can look down and glance at the words when needed.

Google video cur­rently pro­vides detailed instruc­tions on adding cap­tion­ing to videos. Addi­tion­ally, in the Google Video Help Cen­ter, this ques­tions is asked, “Do you gen­er­ate captions/subtitles for my video?” and the answer they pro­vide is a promis­ing “Not at this time.” They also have a sec­tion where you can view exam­ples of cap­tioned videos.

NCAM Press Release

(hat tip: The Assis­tive Tech­nol­ogy Blog)

Alt Text, Less Can be More

Aaron Can­non at NorthTemple.com offers insight from the per­spec­tive of a blind user on the impor­tance of alt text. First from Aaron, as quoted by Ted Boren:

For some rea­son, some folks get it into their heads that being blind is really ter­ri­ble and the only way our lives can be whole is for us to have all the pretty pic­tures in the world described to us. Where, in actu­al­ity, most blind folks couldn’t care less about most of it.

Aaron then expounds:

…if there was a pic­ture of a man using a par­tic­u­lar prod­uct, I’m really not inter­ested in hear­ing “pic­ture of a man look­ing pleased as punch to be using the new ultra-lite USB hair drier,” or worse, “pic­ture of a man.” I really don’t care about what image the design­ers chose to use as eye-candy. I can’t see them, and descrip­tions of mean­ing­less images just waste my time and delay my get­ting to the infor­ma­tion I’m really inter­ested in.

Read the entire post for an apt com­par­i­son of web acces­si­bil­ity to bread mak­ing. Thanks Aaron, I’ll think twice the next time I feel an urge to wax poetic in my alt text.

Acces­si­bil­ity guide­lines make clear that null alt text should be used for images that do not con­vey mean­ing, dec­o­ra­tive images. Is the point at which an image goes from mean­ing­ful to mean­ing­less unclear to any­one else?

Tactile Video Displays

The National Insti­tute of Stan­dards and Tech­nol­ogy has licensed a tech­nol­ogy for the com­mer­cial­iza­tion of a tac­tile graphic dis­play device. The device promises users who are blind the abil­ity to feel images from any num­ber of sources on a refre­sh­able braille dis­play. The tech­nol­ogy has been in devel­op­ment for awhile, but com­mer­cial­iza­tion is a sig­nif­i­cant step forward.

From the press release:

ELIA Life Tech­nol­ogy Inc. of New York, N.Y., licensed for com­mer­cial­iza­tion both the tac­tile graphic dis­play device and fin­ger­tip graphic reader devel­oped by NIST researchers. The for­mer, first intro­duced as a pro­to­type in 2002, allows a per­son to feel a suc­ces­sion of images on a reusable sur­face by rais­ing some 3,600 small pins (actu­a­tor points) into a pat­tern that can be locked in place, read by touch and then reset to dis­play the next graphic in line. Each image—from scanned illus­tra­tions, Web pages, elec­tronic books or other sources—is sent elec­tron­i­cally to the reader where spe­cial soft­ware deter­mines how to cre­ate a match­ing tac­tile display.

From the ELIA Life Tech­nol­ogy About Us page:

The ELIA Life team strives to improve the qual­ity of life of visu­ally impaired per­sons and their fam­ily mem­bers by enabling the visu­ally impaired to live, work, learn, and com­mu­ni­cate with greater inde­pen­dence and dignity.

It appears that they mar­ket the tac­tile alpha­bet as an alter­na­tive to braille and claim that, “only three per­cent of legally blind Amer­i­cans can read Braille”

I don’t know how long before this tech­nol­ogy will be made widely avail­able, but it raises a cou­ple of inter­est­ing questions:

1. Would you pre­fer effec­tive alt text to a tac­tile graphic dis­play device that worked?
2. Will this type of tech­nol­ogy one day be used as an excuse for peo­ple not do use alt tags?

More on the tech­nol­ogy: NIST ‘Pins’ Down Imag­ing Sys­tem for the Blind

(via Web­bAlert)