[Art_beyond_sight_educators] Describing a map research

[Lisa Yayla]

Hi,

This sounds very interesting. I came over a tweet  which led to a study 
at the University of Toronto asking for feed help.
Include link to the research project and excerpt from it. Takes about 30 
minutes.
Regards,
Lisa

Describing a map
http://www.cs.utoronto.ca/~aleciaf/maps/

Tweet
How Do You See Maps? <http://pyre.third-bit.com/blog/archives/3743.html>
2010-04-07 -- 11:42

Back in the 1990s, I did a bit of volunteer work with the Canadian 
National Institute for the Blind <http://www.cnib.ca/>, and one of the 
things I learned was that computers often make life even harder for 
people whose lives are already hard enough. Remember when classified ads 
went online? It was several years before screen readers like JAWS 
<http://www.freedomscientific.com/products/fs/jaws-product-page.asp> 
caught up, which meant that for several years, finding a job or an 
apartment was even harder for the visually impaired than it had been. 
And just when things had settled down, AJAX appeared and broke screen 
readers again.

Another recent(ish) development that has made life harder for the 
visually impaired is the increased use of maps on the web. One of my 
grad students, Alecia Fowler, is trying to address that problem by 
finding out how best to describe maps to people who can't see them. If 
you're willing to give her 30 minutes of your time, please head over to 
http://www.cs.utoronto.ca/~aleciaf/maps/ 
<http://www.cs.utoronto.ca/%7Ealeciaf/maps/> and give her little "game" 
a try.
http://pyre.third-bit.com/blog/archives/3743.html