[accessibleimage] articles mixed

Hi,
Some of the subjects of the articles sent are low-vision web design, online-map design, The Art Institure of Chicago, Audio description,Fashion photographer - Albert Watson, shoftware for color vision and art classes and a conference in Sweden about sound and games.
Best,
Lisa



http://www.hindu.com/2006/04/22/stories/2006042213610400.htm

http://www.tmcnet.com/usubmit/2006/04/21/1594299.htm

http://www.burlingtonfreepress.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20060422/LIVING/604220324/1004&theme=
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2090-2144534_1,00.html

Museum focuses on education and vision
http://fp.uni.edu/northia/article2.asp?ID=4798&SECTION=3


http://www.pressconnects.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20060421/LIFESTYLE/604210304/1004

http://www.detnews.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20060313/BIZ04/603130301/1013
link to product from above link
http://www.colorhelper.com

http://www.alistapart.com/articles/cssmaps

http://www.alistapart.com/articles/lowvision




[April 21, 2006]


Watercooler Stories

(UPI Newswraps Via Thomson Dialog NewsEdge)Museum offers touchable art for the blindCHICAGO, April 21 (UPI) -- The Art Institute of Chicago Thursday opened an exhibit of highly detailed plastic replicas of classic paintings that the blind can feel.



For years, the institute has had a Touch Gallery of sculptures for the blind but now has re-created 12 pieces of its art on portable, machine-etched plastic called TacTiles.

The 8-inch-by-10-inch boards replicate in relief the brush strokes of such masters as Renoir and Miro, the Chicago Sun-Times reported.

On the replica of a Japanese screen by Tosa Mitsuoki, Flowering Cherry with Poem Slips, the bumps of the tree blossoms can be sensed. The relief of fine vines can be felt on the TacTile Trompe-L'Oeil Still Life with a Flower Garland and a Curtain.

While the blind cannot see colors, Braille plaques beside each work describe the work's use of color, the report said.

---------------------

A FIRST FOR VERMONT: Audio Described Movies For Blind and Visually Impaired Film Fans, free preview, 10 a.m., Capitol Theatre, Montpelier. This will allow a person with a visual impairment to go to the movies and hear the non-verbal action described to them through a special transmitter and earphone. Equipment provided to The Capitol Theatre by the Vermont Council of the Blind. 862-8558.



---------------------------------




As companies like Google and Yahoo! have simplified the process of placing information on a map by offering web services/APIs, the popularity and abundance of mapping applications on the web has increased dramatically. While these maps have had a positive effect on most users, what does it mean for people with accessibility needs?

Most online mapping applications do not address issues of web accessibility. For a visually impaired web user, these highly visual maps are essentially useless.

Is there a way to display text-based data on a map, keeping it accessible, useful and visually attractive? Yes: using an accessible CSS-based map in which the underlying map data is separated from the visual layout.

A different starting point
So what if, instead of starting from a map graphic and adding data to points located across the image, we start with the data itself and create a map based on the data?

First, let’s pick some data that has a geographic component so it can be placed on a map. For example, let’s use the 10 most populated cities in the world. Displayed as plain text, the list might look like this:

Tokyo, Japan – 28,025,000 people
Mexico City, Mexico – 18,131,000 people
Mumbai, India – 18,042,000 people
Sao Paulo, Brazil – 17,110,000 people
New York City, USA - 16,626,000 people
Shanghai, China – 14,173,000 people
Lagos, Nigeria – 13,488,000 people
Los Angeles, USA - 13,129,000 people
Calcutta, India – 12,900,000 people
Buenos Aires, Argentina – 12,431,000 people
Note: The data above is intended only as an example and may not be entirely accurate.

Not bad, but it would be nice to add some descriptive text to each of the cities to describe a little more about them. So, an example for just one city might be:

Shanghai, China
Shanghai, China is situated on the banks of the Yangtze River and has a population of 14,173,000, making it the sixth most populated city.
Organizing the data
Now that we’ve added some descriptive information to the city, let’s think about how to organize that data in HTML. A definition list (dl) would be a good way to organize this information because a dl has both definition term (dt) and definition description (dd) child elements. This means we can have the city’s name as a dt and the city description as a dd. Let’s see how that might look:

<dl>
<dt><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shanghai%2C_China";
class="location" id="shanghai">Shanghai, China</a></dt>
<dd>Shanghai, China is situated on the banks of the Yangtze
River and has a population of 14,173,000, making it the
sixth most populated city.</dd>
...
Bringing the rest of our data into the definition list gives us the complete list of 10 cities.

Note that the anchor link within the dt was given a class and unique id. The id allows us to refer to each city individually, so we can locate it on the map. We’ll come back to this a little later.

Adding some style
So where are we now? We’ve created an accessible text-based list of items and their definitions. The data is what we want to convey to the user, regardless of whether they see it on a map or just as text, so we are in good shape. Now that we have the information organized, let’s make a point map out of it.

In a point map, there are three main items that are visually displayed: the map, the point(s) on the map, and data to display when the user clicks on or hovers over a point. We can very easily translate those visual items to the text-based dl we just created:

Map image = dl
Map point(s) = dt > a
Map point popup data = dd
The first step in making dl into a map is to add the background map image with a style. We will give the dl a class of “map” so that only those dls in a document get styled this way (in our example, as a world map).

dl.map {
background: url(worldmap.png) no-repeat;
border: 1px solid #999;
margin: 0px;
padding: 0px;
text-align:left;
width: 550px;
height: 275px;
position: relative;
}The next step is to add a style for the dts that will allow the anchors within to be made into points on the map:

dl.map dt {
display: inline;
}Next, we need to deal with the dd items which will be the data displayed when a point on the map is hovered over. We do not want the dd to display until the a within its associated dt is hovered, so by default we need to hide the dds. Since screen readers will ignore an HTML element with a style of display: none, we need to hide the data by positioning it far away from the browser’s view. The style for the dd will make the element look like a tooltip window:

dl.map dd {
background: #555;
border: 2px solid #222;
border-radius: 8px; /* CSS3 rounded corners */
-moz-border-radius: 8px; /* Mozilla rounded corners */
color: #fff;
padding: 4px;
width: 200px;
position: absolute;
left: -9999px;
z-index: 11;
}Each of the dts contains an a which, by default, takes a user to the Wikipedia article corresponding to the city; this link is what will trigger the tooltip to display the dd. The link will be displayed as a point and the link text will be invisible, so again we need to move the text out of the browser’s view. Each point will also have a different location, but we’ll take care of that in the next step. The base style for the anchor links looks like this:

dl.map a.location {
background: url(point.png) no-repeat;
display: block;
outline: none;
text-decoration: none;
text-indent: -9999px;
width: 10px;
height: 10px;
position: absolute;
z-index: 10;
}
dl.map a.location:hover {
background: url(point-hover.png) no-repeat -1px -1px;
}Finally, we need to add styles specific to each point on the map. These points are represented by the anchor links inside each of the dts. The placement of each point will be accomplished by assigning top and left values (since we already positioned them all absolutely in the above code snippet):

dl.map a#shanghai {
top: 80px;
left: 484px;
}
dl.map a#tokyo {
top: 105px;
left: 121px;
}
...We’ve just created a basic map, so let’s look at where we are with our first example. This example places the points on the map, but does not display any information when a point is hovered over.

Display the data as a tooltip
Now that we have a map with points positioned, we need to display data when the points are hovered over. To display a tooltip we are going to have to use some JavaScript.

The JavaScript to show and hide the dd “tooltip” does so by modifying the style of the dd associated with the current a being hovered. A JavaScript function named showTooltip() places the dd back into the visible area of the browser by modifying its top and left style values, based on the location of the associated a point.

It would be very easy for us to use inline event handlers like onmouseover and onmouseout to accomplish this, but that wouldn’t be very unobtrusive. We want like our script to remain independent of our map and our markup. To do that we can have the JavaScript dynamically assign events to the anchor elements.

But before we dig into the JavaScript, let’s pause for a moment to talk about JavaScript objects. The JavaScript used in this technique makes use of object literal notation, so learning the basics of this will help you understand how it all works. Here is a basic example of an object literal:

var person = {
name: "Homer Simpson",
say: "Doh!",
talk: function(){
alert( this.say );
},
walk: function(){
// code
}
};One of the benefits of using objects in JavaScript is that we can use methods and properties in a more sensible manner. For example, with the above code we can call a method like person.talk() or get a property like person.name. Objects also allow us to reuse method and property names without causing conflict. For instance, if we were to add an animal object to the file above, it could also have an walk method (animal.walk()) without conflicting with the person.walk() method.

The script used to assign the events in this technique is a little more complicated, but here is a shortened skeleton of what this example script looks like:

var mapMaker = {
offsetX: -16, // tooltip X offset
offsetY: 16, // tooltip Y offset
init: function(){
// sets up the maps
},
showTooltip: function(){
// shows the tooltip
},
hideTooltip: function(){
// hides the tooltip
},
addEvt: function( element, type, handler ){
// adds the events
}
};Now let’s dig a bit deeper into some of the methods. For the sake of brevity we will not cover every method, but we will tackle the key ones.

The init() method is our constructor. This means the method is what we call to initialize our mapMaker object. It sets up the map by adding events to each of the anchor links inside the dts, making the tooltips possible. Let’s look at the init method:

init: function(){
var i = 0;
var ii = 0;
var location;
var DLs = document.getElementsByTagName('dl');
while( DLs.length > i ){
if( DLs[i].className == 'map' ){
mapMaker.stripWhitespace( DLs[i] );
var DTs = DLs[i].getElementsById( 'dt' );
while( DTs.length > ii ){
location = DTs[ii].firstChild;
mapMaker.addEvt( location, 'mouseover',
mapMaker.showTooltip );
mapMaker.addEvt( location, 'mouseout',
mapMaker.hideTooltip );
mapMaker.addEvt( location, 'focus',
mapMaker.showTooltip );
mapMaker.addEvt( location, 'blur',
mapMaker.hideTooltip );
ii++;
};
ii = 0;
}
i++;
};
},
The init method first collects all of the dl elements in the document by using document.getElementsByTagName( 'dl' ) and then loops through each, looking for one with a class of “map”. When it finds one, it collects its dt elements and loops through them, assigning event handlers (using the addEvt() method) to the anchor tag within. The events we’ve accounted for include mouseover (which calls the showTooltip() method) and mouseout (which calls the hideTooltip() method) and mirrors the same actions for the focus and blur events, respectively, to make the tooltip available for keyboard users.

Now let’s take a closer look at a portion of the showTooltip() method; this method displays the tooltip dd when a map point (dl.map > dt > a) is hovered. To display the correct tooltip, the function must know which dd is associated with each anchor. From the currently hovered anchor tag, this, we can move to its parent dt tag (this.parentNode) then to that dt’s dd (this.parentNode.nextSibling) which is the tooltip we want to display:

showTooltip: function(){
var a = this;
var tooltip = a.parentNode.nextSibling;
...Once we know which dd element should be displayed we can set the different style attributes to place the dd tooltip into view and move it into the correct location next to the point:

...
// get width and height of background map
var mapWidth = tooltip.parentNode.offsetWidth;
var mapHeight = tooltip.parentNode.offsetHeight;

// get width and height of the tooltip
var tooltipWidth = tooltip.offsetWidth;
var tooltipHeight = tooltip.offsetHeight;

// figure out where to place the tooltip based on the point
var newX = a.offsetLeft + mapMaker.offsetX;
var newY = a.offsetTop + mapMaker.offsetY;

// check if tooltip fits map width & adjust if necessary
if( ( newX + tooltipWidth ) > mapWidth ){
tooltip.style.left = newX - tooltipWidth - 24 + 'px';
} else {
tooltip.style.left = newX + 'px';
}

//check if tooltip fits map height
if( ( newY + tooltipHeight ) > mapHeight ){
tooltip.style.top = newY - tooltipHeight - 14 + 'px';
} else {
tooltip.style.top = newY + 'px';
}
...In the script above the dd tooltip style is changed to bring the element back into the visible area of the map, but the script also takes into account the size of the map and positions the tooltip so it does not go outside the background map image boundaries.

The last detail we need to worry about is running the script when the webpage has loaded. Sounds easy just call window.onload = mapMaker.init() right? Well you could do that, but it doesn’t allow other scripts to run on page load and it would be really nice to trigger this script to run after the page has loaded but before all of the images have downloaded. Thankfully, Dean Edwards has done the work for us on this one and you can check out his write-up of the technique for more information.

We have now reviewed the major parts of this map example’s JavaScript, but did not cover every single function in the script. The functions for adding events get fairly complicated and are outside the scope of this article; however, you can view the entire script here.

Now that we have added some JavaScript functionality let’s look at where we are with this second map example. We now have a visually pleasing map that provides more detail when the user hovers over a city. Of course, because this map is created from text-based data, the data displayed as a map can be read by a screen reader and convey the same meaning.

What about CSS on and JavaScript off?
We need to address users who have JavaScript turned off but use a browser with good CSS support. We want these users to get the lo-fi, but useable text version of the map, because without JavaScript enabled they won’t be able to see the tooltips.

To enable the tooltips and the map style, the JavaScript init() method can be tweaked to turn the map “on.” If the map is not “on,” it will simply display as text only. As we have given our map dl a class of “map,” we’ll need to add a second class: “on.” We’ll also need ot update our style sheet, adding .on to each style rule like this:

dl.map.on {
background: url(worldmap.png) no-repeat;
border: 1px solid #999;
margin: 0px;
padding: 0px;
text-align:left;
width: 550px;
height: 275px;
position: relative;
}The above style will only affect dls that have are class-ified as both “map” and “on” (<dl class="map on">) and will not affect any dls with only a class of “map.” You can see this in action in our third example.

Getting fancy
Now that we have a functional map, why don’t we add some images to the tooltip? This next example map shows images inside the tooltip. Or, maybe you would like to have links inside the tooltip. To do this, we need the tooltip to be “sticky” and not hide when the point is moused off. Here is an example of a “sticky” tooltip map (the JavaScript functions have oviously changed slightly to make the tooltip stick). Finally, this technique also allows for us to place multiple maps on a single page, so we have lots of options.

Where in the world?
Now back to those wonderful APIs. What if you want to use one place points on this world map by latitude and longitude?

Server side scripting examples of how to dynamically place points on the map are beyond the scope of this article, but here is some pseudo code to convert latitude and longitude points to pixels for the world map image used in our example:

/* For this example world map image in map coordinate
system GCS_WGS_1984 */

// set latitude and longitude
pointLat = // between -90.00 and 90.00
pointLong = // between -180.00 and 180.00;

// get map height and width
mapHeight = // map height (in pixels)
mapWidth = // map width (in pixels)

// convert latitude to pixels
pointLat = ( ( pointLat * -1 ) + 90 ) * ( mapHeight / 180 );

// convert longitude to pixels
pointLong = ( pointLong + 180 ) * ( mapWidth / 360 );

/* you may also have to correct for the size
of the point image placed on the map */
pointLat = pointLat - ( [point image height] / 2 );
pointLong = pointLong - ( [point image width] / 2);If you are considering using server side scripting to dynamically place points on a map, you might also consider having the background image of the map be set by JavaScript. This would allow a dynamic page to assign different background map images to the dl based on the area or zoom level you would like to display.

A quick review
Let’s review what we have done:

Started with a text-based list that has geographic components
Turned that text list into an HTML definition list
Styled the dl to look like a map
Styled the dt elements into points located around the map using CSS
Styled the dd elements to look like a tooltips, but moved them out of view
Used JavaScript to dynamically assign mouse and keyboard events to the map points
Enabled the dd “tooltips” to be styled back into view when the map points are hovered
What have we accomplished by doing this?

Created a text-based map
Enabled screen readers, text-based users, and search engines to “read” the map
Created a pleasing visual map for sighted users
Created an interactive map for mouse users
Allowed non-mouse users to interact with the map with their keyboard
Where to go from here?
The example of a more accessible map presented here is just that, a more accessible map. It does not claim to be the best way, just a different way to approach the problem of creating accessible geographic-type content without having to create multiple pages in different formats. This example will not address all types of accessibility needs, nor be an ideal solution to all types of web based maps or GIS applications; however, a text-based webpage is always a great starting point for addressing accessibility concerns.

Compared to other commonly used mapping methods, this technique starts with the data and builds a map around it. Text content is separated from the map layout. When content can be separated from layout the content is generally more accessible. This means that an alternative accessible version may not need to be created.

What we have built in this article is just the start of what might be done on a map. These same concepts could be used to place shapes, or even a drill down map to display detailed data for more specific areas or locations. The important thing to remember is to start with the text-based information you want to convey. First make the data readable and useful as text, and then make it into a map.

----------------------------------












Master of fashion is finally in focus
By Kenny Farquharson

Albert Watson is blind in one eye, but this did not stop the Scot from becoming one of the world's most celebrated photographers


Albert Watson was a five-year-old growing up in 1940s Edinburgh when doctors told his mother there was a problem with his vision. Within three years the boy lost sight in his right eye.
The family was distraught. Would the left one go? To everyone’s relief, tests showed it was a specific problem with the connection between the right eye and the boy’s brain.



In the years since then, his left eye has served him well. Now 63 years old, he is one of the world’s most successful photographers.

If his name is not familiar his photographs will be: Alfred Hitchcock holding a dead goose by the neck, a naked Kate Moss looking like a mermaid, Uma Thurman brandishing a sword in the poster for Kill Bill.

Watson’s fashion shots have made the cover of Vogue more than 250 times and for decades his pictures of celebrities have been on the covers of Life, Newsweek and Rolling Stone magazines. Home for the past 20 years has been New York, but he is about to receive recognition from the country of his birth.

Next month he will be inducted into the Scottish fashion awards hall of fame at a ceremony in Stirling Castle and a retrospective called Frozen will be the summer show at Edinburgh’s City Art Centre, as the city where he started taking pictures with a box camera given to him by his father 50 years ago finally acknowledges his achievements.

Speaking from his New York studio last week, Watson admits that these days he is extra busy. On his mind are preparations for a television commercial. He also has to finalise plans for an exhibition at the 401 art gallery in New York. “What we’ve done is put up four large frames, each with hundreds of Polaroids on them going back 30 or 40 years, as well as some from last week,” he says.

“I have to say it’s quite satisfying. There’s a Vegas dominatrix in a motel room at night and a standing stone in Scotland. There’s Jack Nicholson and Clint Eastwood and the poster for Memoirs of a Geisha. It’s the diversity that’s pleasing.”

One recent job was to photograph Tom Hanks for the poster advertising the film of The Da Vinci Code. “We had him for six minutes. That’s not sitting down and chatting with him for 10 minutes then six minutes with the camera and another six minutes saying goodbye. It’s a matter of waiting for hours on the set of the movie to get him just for that moment.”

That, he says, is what people are looking for when they commission a photograph. “There is a demand for photographers who have an ability to handle celebrities and photograph them quickly and efficiently,” he says.

“They are looking for people who can handle that kind of pressure, and have it lit and ready so the shot is powerful and direct.”

Watson is dismissive of any romantic notion that being blind in one eye somehow heightened in him a sense of the visual. “It never made me depressed,” he says. “If you are born with one leg longer than the other you can still walk around and you can still run and function. I viewed it that way.”

Neither did he suffer from anxiety nor a sense of vulnerability about the eye that worked. “About 10 years ago an optician said to me he couldn’t believe I didn’t wear glasses — not for my sight, but as a last line of defence if something happened.”

Watson’s impaired vision was the inspiration for the title of his best-known artwork — a ground-breaking book of photographs called Cyclops, which sold 100,000 copies when it was published to rave reviews in 1994.

“We thought it was a good image — one eye, one camera, one lens,” he says. “It’s also a nice word — the C and the Y and the C together. It looks interesting.”




That was photography coming of age as fine art. There were tattooed hands, cactus leaves, black torsos and veiled faces — all in Watson’s stylised black-and-white. Many of the images were from Morocco, where he spends part of each year. On every page the shapes and textures were as important as the subject matter. “Style as substance,” said one art reviewer.
Watson is far better known in the US than in the UK, a fact he puts down to America’s attitude to photography as an art form.



“In America you tend not to come across that issue of whether a photographer is really an artist,” he says. “Photography is so dominant now in the contemporary art scene. In Britain I think there’s a bit of a Victorian hangover about that.”

To understand his work, he says, you only have to look at the training he received.

“I had four years of graphic design in Scotland, so initially I was a graphic designer. Then I went to film school for three years. If you go through my work you can actually divide it pretty much into those two categories — graphic then storytelling.”

The care and attention he gives to his work is, he says, a Scottish trait. “What I got out of being Scottish and being schooled in Edinburgh was a discipline — especially at university, where there was a great emphasis on craft.

“It’s all to do with understanding what you want to do and making that journey quickly and simply.”

Next month’s hall of fame ceremony clearly means much to him, because he values his Scottishness. He only wishes his countrymen did likewise. “There is a tendency for Scots to be a little bit suburban about their country,” he says with a hint of exasperation.

What particularly irritates him is the Scottish government’s slogan for attracting incomers. “Welcome to the best country in the world. Excuse me, the best small country in the world,” he says sarcastically.

“Come on, why not say, ‘Welcome to the best country in the world’, and show you believe in it and have that passion for it. It’s just insane.”

In the country of the blind, the one-eyed man may have a point.




Albert Watson will be inducted into the Scottish fashion awards hall of fame at a ceremony in Stirling Castle on May 7. Frozen, a retrospective, is at the City Art Centre, Edinburgh, from July 29 to October 22





----------------------------------------







You don't need to see to believe
Art class targets the visually impaired



CHUCK HAUPT / Press & Sun-Bulletin


Artist Michele LaComb, of Conklin, who is visually and hearing impaired, will teach an art class for visually impaired adults.



Artist Michele LaComb with The Art School will be using clay to create relief sculptures with her visually impaired students.

ABOUT THE CLASS

What: Art Project, A Sculpture in a Frame, an art class for visually impaired adults


Where: The Art School, 2801 Wayne St., Endwell (Senior Center)


When: 9:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. Monday


Fee: $25 (includes materials)


Instructor: Michele LaComb


For information: Contact LaComb at 775-4742


To register: Call The Art School at 797-2517

By RACHEL KALINA
Press & Sun-Bulletin
A blue sky hovering above green grass is a simple scene for an artist to paint, unless the artist is colorblind, like Michele LaComb. Uncooperative blues and greens haven't dulled LaComb's creativity, however -- her paintings encompass all the colors of the rainbow.

Despite vision and hearing loss, LaComb will soon share her artistic talents and skills with others through an art class. This Monday, she is offering an arts and crafts class at the Art School in Endwell to visually impaired students. The 44-year-old Conklin resident hopes the class will be a learning experience both for her and those who attend.

"This is something I always thought I would want to try doing. I feel I can relate (to others) because I do have vision loss," LaComb says of her desire to teach. "I think it will be a two-way street. Maybe being around other people with similar disabilities will help me to understand what I'm going to have to experience someday."

Hearing-impaired since she was a toddler, LaComb was diagnosed with retinitis pigmentosa at age 34. Her visual impairment is slowly decreasing her peripheral sight, and it makes it hard to differentiate between blues and greens. She also describes her condition as having tunnel vision.

"It's like looking through a toilet paper tube," she says.

With a lack of sight above, below and to either side, LaComb, who has taught art classes before, but not for the visually impaired, still manages to capture depth in her paintings. She compensates for her colorblindness by using acrylic paints instead of pastels, which have their colors clearly labeled.

"If it wasn't for my art, I don't know what I'd be doing. It's been very therapeutic for me," LaComb says.

She remembers starting her first sketch book at age 10 and first learning to draw from comics before moving on to muses outside her home. When her vision loss became apparent, it propelled LaComb to capture moments through art as often as possible, to try to record the visual world through art while she still can.

"It's something I always liked doing and wanted to continue, but it just made me do it now instead of later," LaComb says of her artwork. After her diagnosis, husband Stanley LaComb brought her drawing table out of the basement so she could use it more frequently, instead of just for the usual one painting a year.

Her need to create and the satisfaction and therapeutic value of it has inspired the award-winning artist to share the experience with others who are visually impaired. She wants them to experience ways they can be creative, even if it involves using different skills or senses such as touch instead of sight.

An article about world famous blind artist Lisa Fittipaldi, of Washington, D.C., also served as inspiration for LaComb. Like other impaired artists, Fittipaldi has used other senses to help her create, and it is this principle that LaComb has adopted and hopes to pass on.

"I think the class will make people more aware that they can be creative, too. They can have skills; they will just be different, that's all," she says.

The project for the pilot class at the Art School will be a clay relief sculpture in a frame. Students will have various subjects, such as half an apple or a pear, to touch, determine shape and texture, and then recreate.

"I tried creating a sculpture being completely blindfolded and I was surprised with what I could do just by feeling. You'd be amazed how much information you can get just from touch. That's why touch is so important for people who are visually impaired -- other senses are more intensified because you are using them more," LaComb explains.

LaComb also says she must be careful about how she words her instructions in the classroom. Research and experience have told her phrases such as "over there, you will see," can be insensitive to those who are impaired.

The Association for Vision Rehabilitation and Employment Inc. in Binghamton supported LaComb's idea for the class.

"Michele came to us and said 'do you think this is a good idea,'" says Rick McCarthy, director of program services, "and I said 'absolutely.' There's an artistic component to it as well as a social component," he says of LaComb's program.

The class might be particularly advantageous for senior citizens who can feel they are becoming less independent when they start to lose their vision, McCarthy says.

"You might be dealing with folks who haven't done this in 50 years and it can take them back to an earlier time in life and rediscover an activity," he says.

It's also an opportunity to meet people with visual impairments and similar concerns.

"Anything that gets people out and gets people to exercise their minds and creativity is a good thing," he says, "It's the opportunity to exercise some creativity and see you can learn things even if you lose your sight."

Mainly, LaComb wants to give her students the chance to become empowered through art. She eventually wants to start a program for children if Monday's class has a successful outcome.

"I'm hoping that they will find joy in creating and in the opportunity they have, and that they will want to explore other mediums," LaComb says, "I think if they enjoy it they will want to share their work and that will be rewarding."




----------------------

New software tackles colorblind challenges

Program helps make sense of charts, graphs and more


BOSTON -- Like many colorblind people who have adapted all their lives to a particular way of seeing things, Harry Rogers says his inability to discern red and green hasn't caused him much trouble over the years.

Even so, there is one particular challenge: Making sense of charts, graphs and other colorful material on his computer screen. Sometimes he sees a weather map online and says to himself, "Is it raining or snowing there?"

And so the 48-year-old electrical engineer was eager to try eyePilot, a new program that gives colorblind people several ways to filter multichromatic images on their computer screens.

Move the PC's cursor over an item, and eyePilot reports what the color is. If the user clicks on a color name, all instances of it on the page will flash. Or one color can be made to stand out by converting the rest of a page to gray and white.

EyePilot also offers the software equivalent of a TV hue knob, allowing users to adjust the overall spectrum of a page until telling contrasts are more easily viewed.

"It's kind of refreshing that somebody's looking at it," said Rogers, who lives in Andover, Mass. EyePilot "has enabled me to do some things that I have not been able to do before."

In part because computer-savvy baby boomers are getting older, powerful technologies to assist users with disabilities are becoming more prevalent, from speech recognition software to screen magnifiers.

But few efforts have gone into improving the view for people with color blindness, even though about 8 percent of men and roughly one-half of 1 percent of women have some form of it.

EyePilot, which formally launches Monday for $34, comes from what might seem an unlikely source: a small defense contractor named Tenebraex Corp., based in an airy loft in an out-of-the-way dock district on Boston Harbor. Defense-thriller author Tom Clancy is an investor.

Privately held Tenebraex (pronounced "TEN-uh-bray-ex"; the name is derived from the Latin for "shadow") specializes in optics technologies for the military. Its main breakthrough was a honeycombed covering that prevents binoculars, gun sights and other lenses from giving off reflections that can reveal a soldier's location.

More recently, CEO Peter Jones and senior scientist Dennis Purcell have been exploring a filtering method that lets night-vision goggles operate in color rather than their familiar monochrome green. As Jones puts it, imagine what that could mean for the soldier on night patrol who hears, "The bad guy is driving a green car," or "Cut the red wire!"

Tenebraex is working on selling the product to the military. But Jones and Purcell, who met in the 1970s when Purcell was a Polaroid Corp. manager and Jones was a contractor, decided to see if their ideas about color and filtering could have other uses.

EyePilot was born.

In a world where more and more work is conducted online, Jones stresses that the color blind might not be alone in benefiting from the way EyePilot lets users pinpoint particular shades on a screen or shift hues to bring out easier-to-detect contrasts.

He points to a government weather map at http://www.nws.noaa.gov -- a thickly populated menagerie of color-denoted information.

"It's a set of tools," Jones said of eyePilot. "It's a Swiss Army knife. You can use it yourself to decode color."

But some people with color blindness who weren't part of Tenebraex's test marketing questioned whether the software would encounter an enthusiastic batch of buyers.

Quil Lawrence, a radio journalist based in Washington, D.C., said that some graphics online are difficult if, say, one area is shaded in light gray and another one is light blue. Still, "It's never struck me as a horrible inconvenience," he said.

Of eyePilot, he said, "It's fascinating; I don't know how often I would use it."

But Jason Bishop, a financial analyst in Richmond, Va., said he would find it extremely helpful in creating charts for his work. Often what he produces provokes playful ribbing from colleagues "that my charts look like something out of a circus."

He added that color blindness makes some kinds of occupations off-limits, citing electricians and pilots as examples. For those and other jobs that might require use of color computer screens, eyePilot "could open up some opportunity," he said.

"It's a great idea."

------

On the Net:

http://www.colorhelper.com



-------------------------------------------


Big, Stark & Chunky
by Joe Clark
Published in: Accessibility, Browsers, CSS, Graphic Design, Layout, Typography | Discuss this article »

Research shows that low-vision people need dramatically different web design. CSS lets you give them what they need.
Readers of A List Apart will by now be quite familiar with screen-reader users, the largest group of disabled web surfers whom standards compliance actually helps. In a previous article, for example, I examined how well image-replacement techniques work in screen readers (not very).

But — surprise! — most people with impaired vision can still see something, and a large but unquantified segment of this group sees well enough to use a computer with a magnified or zoomed display. We have not done a good job of catering to these screen-magnification or zoom users. Using CSS, it’s easy to do, as we shall soon see. And moreover, using CSS to develop zoom layouts is almost exactly what developers of handheld and PDA browsers are doing in their quest for small-screen rendering of wide, multicolumn web pages.

But first, let’s understand the problem.

A different way to view the web
Websites are mostly type. A low-vision person will probably be able to read type on a web page if it’s big enough and if it’s presented in a certain color scheme.

But when you blow up the fonts on a web page, eventually your display runs out of room. Or even if it doesn’t (are you using a 50-inch plasma display? how about two 30-inch Cinema Displays?), you the low-vision user are sitting at a certain distance from the screen, giving you only a limited field of comfortable view. Moreover, your vision loss may involve visual field; you may simply see less than people with normal vision or even people with other visual impairments.

Eventually, then, every website will outgrow its container if you zoom in far enough. The container may be table cells, divs, the monitor, or the user’s visual field, or any combination. You can use CSS to make sure your site does not knowingly zoom past the perimeter of a user’s vision.

Research
There’s a modicum of published research documenting the needs of zoom users. Of most recent interest is a paper by Ginny Redish and Mary Theofanos (see references).

While many participants in their study had trouble when color was removed from a web page (as some screen magnifiers do when they switch to high contrast), the biggest problem was multicolumn page designs. A few users never discovered some of the columns. Some components, even when located inside a single column that subjects could theoretically see and use, had already scrolled right off the screen and were ignored.

Some highlights from that paper:

These users, however, do not want a “different” site: They don’t want a “screen-magnifier version” or a “text version” if that means a site that has to be separately maintained from the main version. They believe the sites would not be equivalent. They believe the “special” site would not be kept up-to-date. The issue is how to provide “experience equity” and universal usable access to all low-vision users.
[One participant stated] “Headings and bold are very important.”
[Participants] told us that they often copied and pasted material into Word where they could enlarge the font even more and make it bold, thus rendering it easier for them to see. Two other participants made conscious decisions about viewing strategies to accommodate the problems caused by wanting to maximize both how much of the page you see and how easily you can read it. [One person] kept the magnification at 2×, which he said was lower than he needed; he said he was sacrificing ease of reading for seeing more on the screen.
Most of our participants did not use cursor control keys even when doing so might have helped them. Instead, they moused around the screen very rapidly, and, in doing so, often lost any sense of where they were on the web page.
Users who do not work with the scroll bar may never go to the right side of the screen.
Users can miss items – even ones that are next to each other – when the screen is magnified.
Destroy your own design
Now, standardistas have spent years coming up with multicolumn page designs that look nice, render more or less the same in compliant browsers, and (for the keener developers) are also usable to screen readers. We took a slightly defective model (multicolumn pages laid out with tag-soup tables) and cleaned it up somewhat (multicolumn pages laid out with valid HTML and CSS).

Standardistas were able to stomach the idea that blind people were simply ignoring the appearance of their sites because, self-evidently, they were blind. It was no big deal; nothing happens to your visual design when you accommodate blind people.

But to accommodate low-vision people, you have to totally rearrange your multicolumn site. You have to knowingly destroy your original graphic design. But do we need to throw out the baby with the bathwater? No. You can use CSS to customize all versions of your site.

Your default page can use whatever graphic design you like.
Through a site-preferences page or a simple style sheet switcher, the user can switch the same information to a single-column view with big fonts. You can tweak which portions of your navigation scheme actually appear, and where, in each design; you generally want less navigation.
Since we’re not making a text-only page that would probably end up neglected, but are merely providing a different view of the same page, we obviate low-vision users’ fears of being stuck in special gulag.
Design basics
Your low-vision design should do the following:

Switch to a big font
You can let the visitor enter a point size by keyboard, or you can give a reasonable set of predetermined options. Unless you’re using something truly weird (Zapf Chancery, anyone?), you don’t have to worry about font selection. Keep your line-height proportional.
Invert the screen
Many visitors will want light-on-dark text rather than the dark-on-light text we’ve gotten used to since the first Macintosh.
Customize colors
However, bright white on flat black will not work for everyone; it’s too bright. You can provide a few options, many of them reminiscent of 1980s-era terminals (e.g., green, yellow, or blue on black or dark brown, or the old WordPerfect 5.1 default of white on blue).
Rearrange content
This is the biggie: You have to judiciously prune your multicolumn site into one column.
If you want to be really fancy, you can make each of these options individually selectable; you might use a preferences page that lets visitors selectively enable options. (That page would pretty much have to include all the above features at once to be accessible in the first place.) But if you’re just starting out, clustering all these options as a one-click option through a single CSS file will suffice.

And a note about images: Don’t do anything special to them. Do not, above all, assume that a low-vision person won’t be interested in your photos or illustrations. We already know that low-vision kids love digicams and love shooting pictures, since the photos can then be blown up nice and big and edited on computer. If your site features thumbnails or galleries that take up a lot of horizontal space, you may need to rethink your layout. But for nearly all other sites, don’t try to hide, shrink, or enlarge your images.

Navigation
We know from experience with screen-reader users that too much navigation on a page is a serious usability problem. Why else did we invent, and endlessly debate the details of, the now-infamous skip-navigation link?

Now consider the problem for a zoom user. If your navigation (whether a styled unordered list or whatever else) sits in a column at screen left, either that column will occupy a huge percentage of a magnified screen or the visitor will have horizontally scrolled to eliminate it. A large left-hand nav column is simply in the way.

The real solution is to simplify navigation so that it can be skipped if desired or just read in sequence with minimal inconvenience or confusion. I have to agree with J the Z here: If you think your site needs drop-down menus, you need to streamline your site.

To improve navigation for magnifier users:

In most cases, we’ll want one or at most two lines of navbar text — presented horizontally at screen top.
If your navigation is already simple, you may merely need to update your CSS.
If you’re stuck using a huge chunk of navigation, extract only the most important parts for the top navigation row. The rest can be contained at the bottom of the page, for example.
We do not have mature and well-tested ways to do this; it’s all a bit new. Worse yet, HTML stands in our way to some extent. Our options include:

If your navbar is marked up as a single unordered list, it may be necessary to assign classes to the items you wish to show or hide in a zoomed layout (whichever are less numerous, I suppose).
Another option is to use two lists, though that presumes that the precise order of entries works out fine (all the entries you want to show in a zoom layout just happen to be consecutive in one list).
If you have just a few items that are marked up as regular <a></a> elements with divider characters between them, your navigation may be simple enough to leave as-is. If not, you can write a second navbar into your code and selectively show and hide the right navbar in different CSS files.
Examples
My esteemed colleagues Cameron Adams and Sergio Villareal wrote new zoom-layout CSS files for their sites, which you can take a look at as approximate examples of this rather new form.

Cameron Adams
The Man in Blue
Regular
Zoom layout (“contrast layout,” actually)
Sergio Villareal
Overcaffeinated
Regular
Zoom layout (“high-contrast layout,” actually)
Single-column layout
This is not a lot to go on, but it’s all I could squeeze out of the many developers I polled over a period of five months.

We need further examples of zoom layouts to solidify the whole idea in the minds of visual designers. If you give this a whirl yourself on your own site, let us know in the comments to this article and, preferably, also on the ZoomLayouts page at the CSS-Discuss wiki.

Meanwhile, some existing sites use preference pages to specify type and color:

K.S. Pope
Confort de lecture (an offshoot of Handicapzéro)
Sjoerd Visscher
Media types
So far, I have not been able to achieve consensus among potentates of the CSS Working Group that we need a new media type, zoom, to accommodate screen-magnification users. (By contrast, there was some modest agreement that a new reader property was needed. Though that proposal hasn’t gone anywhere, it still could.)

Given the constellation of display properties involved in zoom layouts, with display and hiding of specific page elements, it may be necessary to contemplate a zoom media type after all. I leave this task to others.

Similarities with small-screen rendering
As it turns out, what you’re doing when you use CSS to design a zoom layout is similar to what a handheld browser must do when confronted by a wide, multicolumn page. It too must selectively reorder and hide components so the page content can be enjoyed in a single column. The difference is that there is no significant need to radically restyle the type to make it easier to read; even the default type presentation on many handhelds is considered readable and doesn’t need to be touched.

We can compare the display formats this way:

Conventional Zoom Handheld
No single assumed audience Low-vision audience (no personal choice) PDA owner (personal choice)
Single- or multicolumn Single-column
No limits on navigation Simple navigation preferred Navigation eliminated, rewritten by proxy server, or deferred to page end
Any type color Light-on-dark preferred Browser defaults (usually dark-on-light) preferred
Any type size Large needed Browser defaults preferred

The more advanced small-screen-rendering (SSR) platforms attempt to intelligently determine which side-by-side components, images, headers, footers, and dividers of many sorts are actually important. With few sites offering valid markup, with fewer still using CSS for layout, and with no consensus at all as to how to name different components of a page, SSR devices face a serious challenge of artificial intelligence. (See references below.)

However, you as designer or developer know your own site and all its conventions. There may be a bit of trial and error in CSS properties until you produce a zoom layout that’s simple, big, and readable, but you know up front that it’s possible. And in fact, you can reuse some of the knowledge you gain in rewriting your site for zoomability to make it compatible with handhelds. Starting with your new zoomable style, make the following changes:

Retain a single-column layout.
Don’t specify font, size, or color (unless you really know the platforms your visitors use).
Consider hiding or at least moving all your navigation. Put the content of the page first.
Continue to refrain from doing anything special to images. They are a known issue in PDA browser software and you should let these user agents handle images themselves.
Conclusion
This article will, one hopes, serve as a starting point for a new application of CSS design principles by standards-compliant designers. It seems that, as time goes on, we discover more and more implementation details of what appear on the surface to be technologies that are frozen in time (viz. the HTML and CSS specifications). Similarly, with each passing year we learn more about how to accommodate people with disabilities gracefully without impeding the graphic design or other desirable characteristics of our sites.

But the ball is now in your court. I’d like to see quite a few more attempts at zoom layouts and, in the fullness of time, a general consensus that a professionally-designed, standards-compliant, accessible site isn’t complete without one.

References
Low-vision users
Helping low-vision and other users with websites that meet their needs: Is one site for all feasible? (Redish and Theofanos)
PDF
Plain text
High Accessibility, High Design
Small-screen rendering
Collapse-to-Zoom: Viewing Web Pages on Small-Screen Devices by Interactively Removing Irrelevant Content
PDF
Plain text
The marquee-menu methods explored in this paper — in which PDA users draw diagonal lines to collapse and expand page components — could easily be expanded to conventional browsers, as through a Firefox or Mozilla extension. (It could also be built in as standard equipment. Doing so would, incidentally, assist but not ensure compliance with Guideline 5 of the User Agent Accessibility Guidelines.)

Detecting Web-Page Structure for Adaptive Viewing on Small-Form-Factor Devices
The authors’ method here attempts to infer structure from HTML so it can reorder page components. Needless to say, the whole thing breaks down with invalid markup: “In the page-analysis stage, HTML syntax errors left by the author could cause the HTML parser to produce [an] erroneous HTML DOM tree, which could sometimes make the high-level content-block detection produce unexpected results. For example, a pair of misplaced <form> and </form> [tags] in a web page causes our parser to place the footer of the web page under a small table in the body.”

SmartView: Enhanced Document Viewer for Mobile Devices
PDF (which Google refuses to index since it’s on an FTP site)
“Currently, far too little published material on the web is suitable for mobile devices [undesirable anyway from the standpoint of device-independence].... In a few well-defined cases, the SmartView prototype even adjusts the layout of a section by breaking it up completely and re-flowing it to fit in the window.... The layout is modified by changing the side-by-side arrangements into a top-down arrangement, because the latter is more effective on small screens.”

Opera’s Small-Screen Rendering
Authoring for Small-Screen Rendering
Examples
Acknowledgement
Many of the methods described in this article are derived from a presentation by Aries Arditi at the American Academy of Optometry convention, Dallas, 2003.12.06. The author contacted Mr. Arditi for a reference or citation to that presentation, but received no response.
-----------------------------



Audio Mostly, Sweden
Friday, April 21, 2006

Audio Mostly 2006 - A Conference on Sound in Games, Sweden October 2006

By Lilian Johansson

We are pleased to invite you to participate in the conference Audio Mostly
2006 - A Conference on Sound in Games.

Call for Papers

Audio Mostly - A Conference on Sound in Games

in Piteå, Sweden on October 11-12, 2006 hosted by the Interactive Institute
Sonic Studio

The Audio Mostly Conference provides a venue to explore the untapped
potential of audio as content driver in game contexts, and aims to help open
up this area of thinking by bringing together game designers, audio experts,
content creators, and technology and behavioral researchers. Through this
forum, varied experts may discuss developments and new potentials for audio
gaming in health and fitness, education, industrial training, etc., and
sonic solutions to development challenges in low resolutions scenarios or
environments where screens are unavailable. The aim is to both describe and
push the boundaries of what sound can do to sustain game play and
interactivity.



Submissions:

We ask researchers, game designers, composers, interaction designers, audio
engineers and game developers interested in sharing their results,
perspectives and insight to a multidisciplinary audience to submit abstracts
of 200-450 words for paper or poster submissions before June 18, 2006.
Please specify if your abstract is for a paper or a poster.

Authors of accepted abstracts will be notified by July 1, 2006. Final
submissions are due on August 20, 2006.

Areas of Interest (including but not limited to):

Games designed around audio and sound
Sound in games for low resolution applications
Mobile games/Interactivity using sound in mobile platforms
Scoring in games
Surround sound in games
Sound design for games Audio in Serious Games

Perspectives (including but not limited to):

Game development/design
Sound design
Speech
Computer/Human Interfaces
Menu Navigation, Choice Selection and other Feedback Functions
Mobile platform development
Music Scoring, Music Editing
Interactive Music
Serious Games
Perception Psychology
Audio Engineering
Novel Uses of Sound in Interactive Applications

Important dates:

Deadline for abstract submission - June 18

Notification of acceptances - July 1

Final paper submission - August 20

Deadline for registration - September 10

Conference - October 11-12

For more information, please visit the Interactive Institute Sonic Studio
website

http://www.tii.se/sonic/

or contact us at

audiomostly@xxxxxx

Please forward this call for papers to anyone who may be interested in
participating.

lilian.johansson@xxxxxx


http://www.tii.se/sonic/



--------------------------------



Designs on helping

By LAURA CZEKAJ

Students' projects aid visually impaired

At first glance they don't look different -- a newfangled puzzle for kids, a shoulder bag, an aerobics mat and a navigational device you can attach to your coat.

But these industrial design projects by four Carleton University students, who teamed up with the Canadian National Institute for the Blind, are not your everyday goods. They have the potential to improve the lives of the visually impaired.

These and other projects will be on display at an exhibition held by Carleton's School of Industrial Design at the university's art gallery in the St. Patrick Building, from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., tomorrow to Tuesday.

A colourful three-dimensional musical puzzle for visually impaired children was inspired by Ilana Ben-Ari's desire to build a bridge between those who can see and those who can't.

The game is for visually impaired children, but the idea is that they would play it with those with sight. It boils down to communication, which is the key to the game.


"It was really interesting to watch while they played the game and the different words that they used," says Ben-Ari. "They see the world in a really different way."

BAG GOING PLACES

Charles Ford Carriere's goal in creating his modular shoulder bag was to help the visually impaired with navigation. The bag incorporates navigational technologies, such as the Global Positioning System, to aid in travel. The bag is made of a conductive fabric to allow for changing technology.

It was the most difficult project Ford Carriere had ever done.

"Usually, when you design, you try to put yourself in the place of the user, you imagine the world through the user's eyes," he says. "Because this is the first time I have designed for someone with a visual impairment, it's almost impossible to see myself in that person's shoes."

Christopher Edwards designed an aerobics mat that emits audio speech and tones to lead the person through a workout.

"I wanted to allow them some kind of independence and increase that level of fitness and I had the requirement to increase navigational ability," he says.

The mat provides the visually impaired a way to work out in a safe and comfortable environment while improving sound recognition skills.

Counteracting the hazards of inclement weather was Elizabeth Mitchell's goal. Her navigational aid helps the visually impaired negotiate an array of outdoor conditions.

"This is part of why I got into the program to begin with," she says. "To know that there are a lot of un-met needs in the world and as designers we are able to help people and ultimately make their daily life more accessible."


http://ottsun.canoe.ca/News/OttawaAndRegion/2006/04/21/1543191-sun.html

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