2003-08-29 Writing accessible hypertext and hypermedia (focussing on cultural accessibility) Chair: Helen Whitehead Panel: David Kolb Jim Rosenberg Gavin Stewart Mark Bernstein # Gavin Stewart # Is cultural accessibility important? teaches sociological and artistic aspects of cybercultures references george landow who is eloquent on the importance of new media "there is no such thing as a newbie!" there are inquiring people, intelligence people "you can never read the same thing twice" because reading changes you, but how do you get someone to read it once in the first place? different types of readers inside himself, multiplicity of reading speccy novel readers, Flash Pow Wham, graphic novel/film buff, chatroom ron, the curious, dialogic computing personal computing vs the network: both are wrong -> what's essential is the dialogue between the users and computer [i'll go with that... however that way leads The Media Equation, MS Bob etc. computers aren't good enough at implicature yet. let the computer be the invisible machine, let the dialogue happen with people, or the vapourtrails/artifacts of people.] flash animation which is good poetry he says http://www.hphoward.demon.co.uk/flash/rainbow.html [hey, that's quite funny] # Jim Rosenberg speaking as the bad guy... this is a hypertext project he's done (intergrams) http://www.eastgate.com/catalog/q11.html it's in hypercard [shame], all done in graphics... so that's bad for physical accessibility sample: http://www.well.com/user/jer/ig/ig8.3.html (it uses graphics because if he embedded fonts there are intellectual property rights issues) he recommends, as good hypermedia http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/and/epc_and1.htm (which has lots of 404s unfortunately) -> query: http://www.google.com/search?q=%22miekal+and%22 # David Kolb difference between cultural & physical accessibility . lufthansa website vs southwest airlines trip plan page... lots of questions there: information retrieval confusing; obvious problems there . artistic issues, reading e-literature. vision troubles: you might not be able to see pictures, so navigating with a quicktime panorama might not be possible. can be visually demanding... but you shouldn't deny an artist the tools they want. it's also culturally difficult, you need to know how to read this kind of thing. to explain it would be a translation, a new piece of art, not dumbing it down. another example about translations: a signed play. a good production with poor signing, two viewers have mismatched experiences at the end of the performance. reading big hypertexts that would come out as a size of a book. the interplay between a photo and piece of text is part of the meaning... how do you translate that to give the same kind of experience for different physical accessibilities? cultural accessibility... can be physically accessible but people's surfing habits, etc, make it difficult for them to read. you see a hypertext graph, what are you supposed to do? even when you're familiar with a graph browser, do you click? move things around? [this is the cultural vanneer that needs to be built up around any medium. like, if you were watching muffin the mule and suddenly the sopranos came on... it wouldn't make any sense. and this is what artistic binding does to fields of thought.] # Mark Bernstein why are we talking about accessibility in hypertext? we're talking about sensible engineering to account for organic variability in humans. recurrent theme: hypertext is too hard (ditto computers), hypertext should be "friendly", "more comfortable". user friendliness was harmful to good user interfaces. we have infantalised the user by casting them in this role -- "you must fix this UI because of me". "because this is neither easy nor fun, there must be a mistake" -- this is a childish attitude. fun, familiar, easy -- these are attributes of your mother, not of literature. literature must prepare us with things that are not fun, not easy. [different kinds of accessibility. what should get out of the way, and what shouldn't? he's arguing for ergodic literature, i can see, but should playing a CD be hard, or working your way through the music?] [interesting point about dialogue -- dialogue is often for the benefit of the speaker, who is using the listener as someone to bounce ideas off, the conversation is quite selfish. and then a distinction between dialogic/dialogue -- worth looking into i think.] an interesting question that brings up another level of accessibility in music. playing the CD, understanding the music... the other: being able to make the music yourself. if you can't start making a hypertext novel, what does that mean? means there are professional artists/authors. to be accessible we need better tools, and the confidence to say that as an amateur one can make a hypertext poem. [this is important, but how long has this been a requirement? it this a new(ish) thing? that ability to create is a right? it's an elaboration of freedom of speech, i think, the ability to create URIs is a freedom *given there's no constraint that subsequently requires property rights*.]