Re: handicapped - opinions/info

Hi Ted,

Jb has found, as I have, that many "" sorts of alt tags don't display 
(except for a little white box) but my husband will sometimes still hear 
them.  Putting in two blank spaces renders them always speechless.  YMMV 
depending upon speech program, perhaps, but that is what we have found to 
be optimal for JAWS.  It is the IE of text to speech programs, with Window 
Eyes in a much closer second place than NN.

We have had a number of his blind associates check out our pages and by far 
the "  " construction was the most silent for diverse individuals using 
various PC's with LYNX and IE.  If I remember correctly, they used various 
versions of Jaws, Window-Eyes, and HAL.

However, if you have a large site I would not worry about going back and 
changing a thousand alt="" notations unless you can do a site revision 
through a site search and replace or something.

What we, as the sighted see, and what users of text to speech readers hear 
is not the same thing.  Honestly, I can't look at the computer screen much 
when my husband is using it as I can get nauseated from the jerking around 
of the screen - it's like being sea-sick.  You see, I'm used to reading 
from left to right, up to down and I'm not used to seeing the page jerk 
around to accommodate his jumping around looking for or trying to get 
through a pile of links, for instance.

I have managed to totally screw stuff up for him by "clicking" in a GUI 
environment that is actually a non-GUI because of JAWS.  It's 
complex.  Whatever you think you see there, may or may not exist where you 
believe it is for someone using JAWS - and sometimes it does not exist at 
all, even though it should.

I used to use the alt="" construction until I found out that it was not 
always silent.  Having listened enough (more than enough) to pages where it 
says, "graphic, graphic, graphic", about 10 times until he gets to 
something useful, I can understand the desire to rip all graphics out of 
web pages that are not mission critical.  I sometimes use them myself, but 
I do my utmost to avoid them whenever possible.

In all honesty, as we don't know anyone who uses braille for the net, I 
don't have a specific concept of what would work best in that situation.

I had contact with a young gal who was working on the experimental 
braillers that display all sorts of graphics, but I lost touch with 
her.  She used braille for her net work and also used it extensively in 
school in her math classes, which is why she was helping with the testing 
of the new braille graphic calculator computer.

It's possible, I suppose, that a 1 pixel gif, whether named or not, might 
be represented on a graphical display, as a line.  I suspect it would not 
be brailled if it were "  ".

Regards,
Marsha

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