[accessibleimage] eye tracking, Garofalo, alt link, Acess Art, Hellen Keller Show

Hi,
From a blog a discussion about alternative text, link to an article about Garofalo. Perhaps a bit off topic, from another blog an article using eye tracking to show and the different ways of seeing. 
Regards,
Lisa


link
Access Art The Dayton Art Institute
http://tours.daytonartinstitute.org/accessart/

excerpt article
http://www.artdaily.com/section/news/index.asp?int_sec=2&int_new=19651
In 1531 Garofalo suffered a misfortune: he became blind in one eye and in 1550 he finally lost his vision entirely.
Garofalo's The Marriage in Cana is dated precisely 1531. It was part of a series of paintings that the artist worked on for many years for free, "solely out of love for mankind…including all holidays, when in the monastery and in the San Bernadino nunnery." Four canvases from this series were purchased for the Hermitage by Nicholas I. Of these, three may be seen in the exhibition: The Marriage at Cana, The Allegory of Old and New Testaments and The Bearing of the Cross. The fourth painting, The Miracle of Bread and Fish, was transferred in 1931 to the Far Eastern Art Museum of Khabarovsk. 


excerpt
http://liblog-usa.blogspot.com/2007/03/im-back-from-spring-break-filled-with.html
Helen Keller Art Show of Alabama. This show on the first floor of the University Library displays prize winning entries of visually impaired students of all ages in Alabama public, private, home and residential schools. It is the 24th annual statewide contest supported by the Helen Keller Birthplace Foundation, the Alabama Federation of the Council for Exceptional Children, and University of Alabama at Birmingham's Vision Research Center, and schools of Optometry and Education. It will be on display through April 15th." 

article


perhaps bit off subject
http://scienceblogs.com/cognitivedaily/2007/03/artists_look_different.php

Artists look different
Category: Art • Attention • Face perception • Perception • Research
Posted on: March 15, 2007 11:25 AM, by Dave Munger
These two pictures represent the eye motions of two viewers as they scan a work of art with the goal of remembering it later. One of them is a trained artist, and the other is a trained psychologist. Can you tell which is which? 

How about for this picture?
Art teachers have noted that when beginning students attempt to draw accurate portraits, they tend to exaggerate the size of key features: eyes and mouths are too big relative to the size of the head. Trained artists learn to ignore these temptations and draw the world as it really appears. Even world-famous artists such as Leonardo da Vinci have had to resort to tricks such as looking at their subject through a divided pane of glass in order to render proportions accurately. As you can see from the two examples above, even when looking at a picture, artists look differently. So which is which? I'll let you know at the end of the post.
Stine Vogt and Svein Magnussen showed 16 pictures including these two to trained artists and non-artists (psychologists) enrolled in Norway's top graduate programs in their respective disciplines, using eye-tracking cameras and software to monitor where they looked. The viewers were unaware of the purpose of the test -- they were told the study was about pupil size and response to pictures. In the first phase of the experiment, viewers simply looked at each picture in random order, and in the second phase, they were asked to view the pictures again, but to concentrate in order to remember them.
Vogt and Magnussen defined key areas of each picture -- small regions around focal objects such as human bodies or faces. This graph shows how often artists and non-artists looked at these areas:
In both cases, non-artists spent significantly more time looking at these key areas than artists. Interestingly, even artists spent more time looking at these areas when trying to remember the pictures.
So who was better at remembering pictures? At the end of the study, participants gave unprompted verbal descriptions of as many of the pictures as they could, in any order. Overall, the artists remembered more details from the pictures, but surprisingly, non-artists actually remembered more of one type of pictures: abstract pictures with no recognizable objects. Artists were able to change their viewing strategy to remember the non-abstract pictures, but with no recognizable objects in abstract pictures, there was no change in strategy.
So why do artists look at pictures -- especially non-abstract pictures -- differently from non-artists? Vogt and Magnussen argue that it comes down to training: artists have learned to identify the real details of a picture, not just the ones that are immediately most salient to the perceptual system, which is naturally disposed to focusing on objects and faces. With this in mind, there's little doubt which pictures above show the artist's eye movements -- they are the ones to the right, which sweep across the whole picture, not just the human face and figure.
Vogt, S. & Magnussen, S. (2007). Expertise in pictorial perception: Eye-movement patterns and visual memory in artists and laymen. Perception, 36, 91-100. 

article blog
http://blogs.cetis.ac.uk/accessibility/2007/02/12/should-alt-text-be-used-to-paint-a-thousand-words/

Should alt text be used to paint a thousand words?
We’ve all been told that alt text is an essential part of web accessibility, but how much detail do we actually need to include and who should do it?
There’s been some discussion over on the DC-Accessibility JISCMail Discussion List (February 2007, “Not Accessible or Adaptable”) about a lot of issues, including whether alt text should always be added to an image. One contributor to the discussion gave a link to a slideshow of dance photographs, where:
“the author refused to label the images with text… his argument being that the photographers images capture and demonstrate an emotional experience, and that whilst text can perform the same expression, he’s not the person to annotate them.”
The photographs in question are various stills from dance rehearsals and performances. There is no accompanying text of any kind, but most people would probably recognise that the people in the photos were involved in some sort of dance medium from the clothes being worn, the environment, and from the positions of the bodies. However, unless one knows the language of dance or the context in which the dance is being performed, the photos may have no further meaning - and could therefore be inaccessible to some people. 

This actually brings up several issues:
1. How can one describe an image that expresses emotion or abstract concepts?
2. If such concepts can be described, who should be responsible (and have the capability) for doing so? 

3. Where does alt text fit into all this?

1. Describing Emotion and Abstract Concepts
So is it possible to extract emotional and abstract meanings and describe them for people who do not have a concept or understanding of such areas? The Dayton Art Institute Access Art Website has attempted to do so. For each artwork on the Access Art website, there is an image, a section on the artwork in context, comments by the Art Director (including an audio commentary) and a description of the artwork. Each section is no more than a couple of paragraphs. For example, the description of Frishmuth’s “Joy of the Waters” has attempted to put across abstract concepts such as the mood of the statue:
“The girl’s springing, energetic step, joyful expression, and animated hair create an exuberant mood and suggest that she may be a water sprite.” (Marianne Richter, Dayton Art Institute)
This helps make the artwork become more accessible for visually impaired people and for people who do not know the language of art. 

2. Responsibility for Describing Images
The people best qualified to describe a visual resource are probably the people who have decided it should be included in the first place. For example, someone with archaeological experience is probably best placed to describe an image of a stone tool, whilst a geography tutor may be the most suitable person to describe a meteorological image from a satellite put onto the university’s VLE (Virtual Learning Environment).
The descriptions used will also differ depending on the image’s intended audience. A museum generally has a wide public audience with many different levels of understanding and access requirements, whilst a Geography department may only have a small number of students at a fairly high level of understanding.
So, unless the photographer in the quote above, is also versed in the language of dance, he is unlikely to be able to describe the dance photos he has taken. Even if he were, he would also need to be aware of the level at which they needed to be pitched in terms of language, description, and audience. 

3. Use of alt Text
So where does alt text fit into all this? The W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) WCAG (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines) recommends providing:
“…a text equivalent for every non-text element (e.g., via “alt”, “longdesc”, or in element content)… For complex content (e.g., a chart) where the “alt” text does not provide a complete text equivalent, provide an additional description using, for example, “longdesc” with IMG or FRAME, a link inside an OBJECT element, or a description link.”
Therefore, alt text should be used for every image (even empty alt text should be used for spacers and decorative images), but it should only provide a brief text description of the image - the Guidelines on ALT Texts in IMG Elements recommends no more than 50 characters. Longer descriptions of an image, such as those describing complex images, emotions, or abstract concepts, should not be included as alt text, but should either be attached as a separate link (perhaps using the longdesc or d-link elements) or added next to the image.
Alt text can also be different for different audiences and purposes (see WebAIM’s Communicating the Purpose of the Graphic) and does not necessarily need to be completed by experts. However, although the photos of the dancers should have had alt text, they may well have needed someone with a knowledge of dance to add it. Basic alt text, such as “photo of dance students” could have been added by anyone but would there be any benefit to seeing roughly the same alt text added to over 80 images? A choreographer would be capable of adding more informative alt text, such as stating the dance step or intention, e.g. “photo of a dancer in fifth position”, particularly where the intended audience was other dancers or dance students.
Alt text is a requirement under the WCAG guidelines, but it shouldn’t be used to describe an image in a thousand words - these have to be written elsewhere. 





http://movingpictureblog.blogspot.com/2007/02/complete-feature-lineup-well-complete.html
BLINDSIGHT
Directed by Lucy Walker.
An emotional account of one visually-impaired man’s journey to climb Mt. Everest, with a collection of visually-impaired children. (Regional Premiere)

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