I’m wondering how my renderings from 3-D virtual worlds could be made accessible to deaf-blind Fediverse users, if there are any.
I’ve read somewhere that they have no use for visual descriptions. They want to know what someone or something feels like when touched.
But how shall I describe what something feels like that isn’t even tangible?
@accessibility group @a11y group
#ImageDescription #ImageDescriptions #ImageDescriptionMeta #CWImageDescriptionMeta #Inclusion #A11y #Accessibility
@jupiter_rowland Can you imagine what unreal surfaces would feel like? For example, if it’s shiny or rough or looks plasticky, you could mentally conceive of what it might feel like, and then describe that.
You can make it clear in descriptions that you’re talking about virtual content and so the descriptions are speculative, and that would still be of value to a reader who otherwise gets nothing they can relate to.
@James Edwards That’d still be making stuff up. I only describe what’s actually really there, and what everything actually is like. You can’t touch them, you can’t feel them, and “what if” has no room in my image descriptions.
Besides, no, I don’t know what unreal surfaces would feel like, also because they lack any and all properties of real-life surfaces.
And if I had to think up what literal dozens of different surfaces in one image feel like, it’d take me even longer to write my image descriptions. And it already takes me from several hours upward to describe one image.
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #ImageDescription #ImageDescriptions #ImageDescriptionMeta #CWImageDescriptionMeta #VirtualWorlds #A11y #Accessibility
@jupiter_rowland Yeah it would be making stuff up, but I mean (literally and figuratively speaking) – all stuff is made up.
Does it matter if a description only amounts to “what if”, if the alternative is no description at all?
The underlying question is about what might be useful for this group of users, but it seems to me that’s slightly at odds with a desire for strict empirical accuracy.
So maybe the question is – what’s more important?