[thelist] Tremendously simple use of flash to make a point.

[Catherine Giayvia]

Morning, evolters,

The site seems fairly silly to me. It's lovely in it's flash presentation, 
but it strikes me as counterintuitive to choose a medium that is completely 
inaccessible to the blind in which to present an organization whose goals 
are to make the blind independent. What if a blind person wanted to make a 
donation for the betterment of his South American fellows? Where is the 
text-only version of this site?

I worked with blind people for two years, and I learned a lot from them 
about accessibility issues. Number one being that given the proper tools and 
the opportunity to learn, blind people can be as computer savvy as anyone 
with sight. Speech/braille access technology and keyboard commands, combined 
with good alt-text descriptions on graphics and (if a site is 
animation-based) a good text-only site, are the basics of what is needed for 
a blind person to surf the web with equal success and independence. It's 
still a challenge for many, and blindness technology sometimes has trouble 
keeping up with the emerging technologies for the web, but I guess the 
problem I have with this site is that it implies that blind people can't 
surf at all without sighted assistance. This just ain't the case, but you 
wouldn't know it from this site.

The credit card thing at the end seems kind of questionable to me, too.

--Catherine


----Original Message Follows----
From: George Donnelly <gsd at mac.com>
Reply-To: thelist at lists.evolt.org
To: thelist <thelist at lists.evolt.org>
Subject: RE: [thelist] Tremendously simple use of flash to make a point.
Date: Mon, 17 Jul 2000 12:26:33 +0900

its

An auditory description of a multimedia
presentation¹s visual track [which] benefits people who cannot see the
visual information.


from the Web Content accesibility Guideliness

Non-text equivalents of text (e.g., icons, pre-recorded speech, or a video
of a
person translating the text into sign language) can make documents
accessible to
people who may have difficulty accessing written text, including many
individuals
with cognitive disabilities, learning disabilities, and deafness. Non-text
equivalents of
text can also be helpful to non-readers. An auditory description [p. 28] is
an example
of a non-text equivalent of visual information. An auditory description of a
multimedia
presentation¹s visual track benefits people who cannot see the visual
information.

Regards,
GEORGE DONNELLY
george at cyklotron.com
http://cyklotron.com/
In a time of drastic change it is the learners who inherit the future. The
learned usually find themselves equipped to live in a world that no longer
exists. --Eric Hoffer


 > http://www.thunderhouse.com.br/cannes/laramara/

anyone willing to describe what i would've experienced if i had a sound
card?



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