Sometimes a Picture Isn't Worth a Thousand Words and Should Be
by Jay Joiner
September 8, 1999
North Carolina Network News (ncnn.com)
Sometimes a picture isn't worth a thousand words and should be. Lt. Governor Dennis Wicker says there are too many pictures, or graphics, on the state's computer systems, and visually impaired citizens and state employees can't make sense of them. Wicker has formed a task force to tell the state how to make its computer information more accessible to everyone.
Kathy Brack, an employee of the North Carolina Division of Vocational Rehabilitation, has a computer program that reads text to her aloud, but she can not see information included in the pictures. "I am totally blind and use a screen reader," she says. "It gives me the ability to read the computer just like everybody else, with the exception of graphics." Brack says, "Graphics is our big problem." Wicker says this new task force must recommend a way to change that. He says, "The main Web page for the state of North Carolina and all the information that is available on it is not fully accessible to the blind and visually impaired." Not only should the state correct that because "it is the right thing to do," but Wicker says that the state may have a legal obligation to do so.
Brack is one of many blind or visually impaired people who, just like so many "sighted citizens," must use a computer to do her job. Her screen reader program is called JAWS, an acronym for Jobs Access With Speech. She says that it reads Internet text produced by a Microsoft browser program, but often has trouble when she uses a Netscape browser to go to the Internet.
The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), which develops standards for the Internet, has laid the groundwork for computer enhancements intended to level the playing field for disabled computer users. As Internet Web pages are constructed with the new Hypertext Markup Language (HTML 4.0), authors are required to add a textual description underneath all screen images and navigation graphics. These "titles" will pop up when sighted users pause their mouse pointers over the pictures. The W3C recommends that visually impaired users set their browser programs in text mode, so that these textual titles replace the pictures. Officials hope that programs like JAWS will be able read this text. The newer HTML authoring program also includes provisions for longer descriptions of pictures and graphics.
Computer programmers are moving more toward the use of "multimedia," sound and video, to carry information. This becomes a problem for the hearing impaired. The Corporation for Public Broadcasting, WGBH television and radio of Boston, and the National Center for Accessible Media have been working with Microsoft Corporation and Apple Computer Company to develop new captioning standards for multimedia. They have created an encoded enhancement called SAMI, Synchronized Accessible Media Interchange. As the video and audio programs are written, authors use SAMI to build in the captions. Mary Watkins, Outreach Manager at WGBH, says Microsoft and station employees have used SAMI to caption Encarta, the CD ROM encyclopedia. W3C has developed a different tool, which the consortium calls SMIL, Synchronized Multimedia Integration Language, with the hope that authors will use it to caption Internet multimedia. In all these cases, Watkins says the captions are built in when the multimedia program is produced. She says she knows of no program that can interpret the sounds from an uncaptioned multimedia presentation and display the message as text.
