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Re: Maccessibility: Text Munging for Accessibility (Comprehension) Testing

for

From: Peter-Paul Koch
Date: May 6, 2003 12:41PM



>Text Munging for Accessibility (Comprehension) Testing
>
> MetaFilter has a link today (provided by Ben Yackley) which links to
>The Eater of Meaning -- a little Web app written by Leonard Richardson that
>will retrieve a Web page and convert the text into pure nonsense.


> Why do I call this potentially useful? Simple: This kind of
> distorted-but-close word translation can be very effective for
> modelling certain types of cognitive disabilities related to the
> ability to read.
>

I'm not sure if this will actually help us to understand the cognitively
disabled. After all, we should target those users still able to understand
some words in some contexts. If they can't do that they aren't able to read
at all and we wouldn't have a problem (or rather, a completely unsolvable
problem).

I wondered if it wouldn't be better to only change *long* words (of, say, 10
characters or more) and leave the short words intact.

Or maybe keep often-used words intact and garble rare words...

But that would require a database and more complicated stuff, hmmm...

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ppk, freelance web developer
Interaction, copywriting, JavaScript, integration
http://www.xs4all.nl/~ppk/
Column "Keep it Simple": http://www.digital-web.com/columns/keepitsimple/
--------------------------------------------------


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