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From: Kynn Bartlett
Date: Tue, May 06 2003 9:57AM
Subject: Maccessibility: Text Munging for Accessibility (Comprehension) Testing
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From Maccessibility:

Mac + Accessibility = Maccessibility
http://www.maccessibility.com/archive/000543.php

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.
For example, here's the banner from the top of the Maccessibility
site:

Mace

Macdonald + Accent = Macon

Abolitionist Thiensville Situation | CLP | Emancipate Yggp

Reclassifying Newsweek on Macbeth, Acceptably, andromache Mach Accord

Thickens blown is maine by Dbvx Barbed, autos, accuses
controllability, andrew Maces usenix. Fzdz is theatrical Chinks
Technical foreseeable Eshqx Mournfulness Introspective.

This is similar to the process of greeking, or providing mock-ups of
designs with the real text substituted for something in Greek (or
another language). The "lorem ipsum" Latin text is standard for this
purpose, but sometimes just random English words are used too.

Greeking can be a valuable tool for testing the comprehensibility of
layout decisions in Web design (warning: Jakob link), as well as
rating whether or not the Web page is accessible to users who can't
read the written word easily. If you can figure out what the page is
about (even if you can't understand all the content) if the text is
greeked, it probably means you've got some good images there, which
is
a plus for people with reading problems. (Note: My own pages, along
with most Web accessibility pages, are notoriously bad on this scale.
I need to use more graphics.)

A number of years back, I coded up my own greeking script, called The
Greeker, which translates pages into their rot13 equivalents.

The Eater of Meaning looks to be much superior, as it includes a
number of interesting options. The "eat in Latin" setting uses the
traditional "lorem ipsum" text as a source for words. But potentially
more useful is the option to "eat word endings," which is the
default.
This means that the first few letters of the word are preserved --
assuming it's a "real word" (and not nonsense like "Kynn") -- and a
new ending is tacked on the end.

Before:

Why blind users can't register at Slashdot

After:

Why blisters usefulness canonicalization regressive at Slaughter

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.

The Eater of Meaning should be considered a useful tool for
accessibility evaluation, and I thank Leonard Richardson for creating
it!

--
Kynn Bartlett < = EMAIL ADDRESS REMOVED = > http://kynn.com
Chief Technologist, Idyll Mountain http://idyllmtn.com
Author, CSS in 24 Hours http://cssin24hours.com
Inland Anti-Empire Blog http://blog.kynn.com/iae
Shock & Awe Blog http://blog.kynn.com/shock


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