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Conveying information found in maps

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From: Hockenheimer, Matt
Date: Jul 8, 2005 8:45AM

(Note: Apologies if this is a repeat, I tried sending this before and didn't get a confirmation back that it had been received, and it's been long enough that I'm guessing it wasn't received before)

Hello everyone,

I've got a slight problem I'm trying to solve as far as accessibility for a website I'm designing at the moment. Due to the nature of the website, I can't get away from having a couple of maps on the screen with information that's vital to being able to use the rest of the site. Other then this one thing, the site is 508 Compliant, but I'm having trouble deciding how to present the information on the map itself in such a way that someone using a screen reader can use it, short of throwing out hundreds of datapoints as raw text - it would be so much information as to make it just as useless as the map (kind of reminds me of the phrase "A picture is worth a thousand words" - there's some data that's really difficult to represent without being able to use images).

For reference, it's an ocean map used for navigation in an educational game. The map shows the informaton the user needs to use to decide which direction to go next - things like sea currents. Showing the information for the player's location is easy, just gotta grab it out of the database, and the direction to go to reach the ultimate desitnation can be displayed easily also, but conveying the surrounding area so that the best path can be chosen is a bit more troublesome. Gradients are one possibility I've considered, indicating how the data is changing as you go in various directions... but I'm worried that might be a bit beyond the abilities of the target 5th grade age group. Showing all the data, as I said above, would be too much - the area reachable in one round encompases roughly 400 different exact locations. I suppose some statistical approximating based on area would work - break it down into, say, 16 square zones and do averaging within each one, or average each of the 8 main cardinal directions - but a lot of information is lost that way, putting the blind student at a disadvantage relative to classmates, plus it prevents the blind student from planning based on the larger picture, which would result in a big drop in the blind player's overall effectiveness. However, it's looking like my best option at the moment.

Anybody else face an issue like this before? Any ideas for how I can get around this without compromising the playability for blind users, or is this pretty much a problem that can't be fully solved with current technology?

Thanks for the help!
Matt