Re: Deaf Matters

[Kurt Cagle <cagle@olywa.net>]

Some thoughts on this, having dealt with accessibility issuesin the past. It 
is worth looking at an HML document as a description of an avatar -- even if 
that avatar is itself an accurate representation of a human being. To that 
extent, to perhaps dehumanize it just a little bit, it's probably worth 
thinking about this hypothetical human as being an application of some sort 
that can or cannot support certain media formats (or may support them in 
limited fashion).  

For instance, from a purely functional standpoint, a person who is hard of 
hearing may simply need for the volume of the application to turn up by 50%, 
while for a person who has no hearing the same action would be not only 
useless but an irritant for anyone else in the same room.  Additionally, one 
of the purposes of such an HML document is to provide a mechanism that would 
inform a media browser to map a certain media format (perhaps through RDF or 
XSLT or some combination thereof) to a different media format for 
presentation. If I have a VoxML stream and a query against the HML reveals 
that the person can't hear but has a map to an XHTML reader instead, this 
makes the presentation much more useful to the reader.

I'd be especially careful about the terminology used here. From 
personal experience (I have two close friends who are blind, and another two 
who are parapelegic - one a former near Olympic quality skier who was injured 
in a skiing accident) the wrong terminology can prove to be political 
dynamite.

Finally (and I think this holds for HML in toto) it may be worth while to 
handle this as a distinct module. For most people, this information isn't 
immediately relevant, and there is no real reason to include it, but when it 
is needed, there are a number of characteristics that would tend to go 
together -- associated mappings between media, units used, and so forth. This 
is ticklish in another respect, because you begin to blur the distinction 
between what is appropriate as an avatar description and what becomes a 
medical record; if I have a listing indicating some form of mental disability 
in particular, and this becomes integrated into such an avatar database that 
becomes accessible to outside vendors, then you have a potential lawsuit on 
your hands. 

-- Kurt


On Wednesday 22 August 2001 10:12, s.livingstone@btinternet.com wrote:
> Hi Darren.
> I think this is a very good point to bring up, and even further for the
> accessibility initiatives in general.
>
> I was just thinking that things related to accessibility may fit in the
> HumanML. I don't have particularly great examples yet, but certainly,
> "deaf", "can't hear", "blind", "color blind" etc  *may* fit in here and if
> not there shoudl certainly be consideration for it. My difficulty just now
> is trying to think of exactly what would *be* in HumanML and that is mainly
> because i only started looking into it yesterday :)
>
> Anyone have any thoughts?
>
> cheers,
> Steven
>
> Steven Livingstone,
> Author Pro XML 2e and others.
> http://www.deltabis.com
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: sarcasmo@fuse.net [mailto:sarcasmo@fuse.net]
> Sent: Wednesday, August 22, 2001 9:58 AM
> To: humanmarkup-comment@lists.oasis-open.org
> Subject: Deaf Matters
>
> Hello.  This may be an unusual request.
>
> I find the concept of HumanML interesting, and it led me to wonder
> if any discussions about Deaf users (such as myself) has appeared
> on the lists.  I say 'unusual', because American Sign Language, (ASL)
> for one, is not textually based.  However, I am sick and tired of the
> Deaf never being accounted for, either.  I've joked about coming
> up with an RFC-like outline for DeafML or ASLML (or maybe mildly
> threatened) in the past.
>
> Any thoughts?  Should I just bring this issue to the commitee?
>
> P.S. I did do a search through the 'htdig' form on your archive
> site with the keywords 'deaf', 'Deaf', and 'American Sign Language'
> and got zippo returns.
>
> Thanks for taking the time to read my letter.
>
> ~darren
>
>
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