The Crazy Rants of Samantha Burns

I guess some people really do buy it for the articles.

I don't know why Playboy in braille is such a shock for folks. It's been around for decades. True, the illos aren't reproduced, though nowadays, thermaform printing would make at least some representation of photos possible albeit at great expense, but there are plenty of articles print-impaired folks want to read. And yes, folks do buy it for the articles. Back in the '70s, I believe it was, my mother asked my father to pick up the issue with the Mel Brooks interview. It was a wonderful article. Yes, I read it, too.

And for the record, I work with blind and visually impaired people, many of whom are very adamant about getting their braille Playboys on time.

Love your site. Although I couldn't find a link to your email. It could be because of my clear handicap or? Anyway I had to throw you some love...here's the permalink
http://kirchner.typepad.com/touchthepriest/2005/12/burnside.html

I hope you win.

Rob

LMAO @ Mel I'm sure they have great descriptions for the photos. I wrote a post sometime back about blogging for the blind and visually impaired and that was one of the things I found in my research- they said to make your site better for them, give good descriptions of photos you have posted. I imagine the same thing goes for photos in magazines.

Like in Sam's picture on the header of this blog she has for alternate text- Samantha Burns. It should say something like One really cute chick named Samantha Burns or something. LOL

Diane, it's not so much describing the photos on your blog or website, but the alt tags. Many people use screen readers like JAWS (it reads the site aloud for them and will read alt tags). If there are no alt tags, the people who can't see the photos won't know what's there, only that something isn't being read. The descriptions coming later doesn't help the frustration much in that case. There are many other standards for designing sites for visually impaired and blind folks, including font size, choice of colors, use of animation, use of frames, etc.

Oops, did notice the mention of alt tags after I commented. The earlier reference to descriptions was confusing. :)

I'm not visually disabled, but I do have issues reading off a computer screen at times, which is one reason why this issue matters so much to me.

Not a problem Shelly! I probably didn't explain myself as well as I could/should have. I always try to remember to put in a good description on the alt tags on my blog but sometimes I get in a hurry and skimp.

I've been bad, too, especially in the beginning when I didn't know how to add the alt tag to html. For my website, it was easy, because Dreamweaver just has a little box for me to type it in. :)

That's part of the trouble - some of us just don't have the knowledge of how to make it readable and lack the tools to test if it is readable.

For example, I'm not sure how this blog is read by someone with a reader since the stupid side bars show up first in the HTML. I'd imagine it may be frustrating reading a list of blog names before getting to the content. Then again, I don't have the tool to test to know if this is a problem. Further, even if I did, I'm not that good at HTML to know how to fix some of the readability trouble if I did know about them.

I'm also not sure what how the alt tags are read by screen readers so they can contain the proper information. Should they be long and descriptive or short and quick. Also the alt tags don't show anything visual when they aren't set so sometimes it's difficult to notice when they are missed.

I can imagine those that use readers must get very frustrated with all of us at times.