I’m wondering how my renderings from 3-D virtual worlds could be made accessible to deaf-blind Fediverse users, if there are any.
I’ve read somewhere that they have no use for visual descriptions. They want to know what someone or something feels like when touched.
But how shall I describe what something feels like that isn’t even tangible?
@accessibility group @a11y group
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@UnCoveredMyths Well, it isn’t just about the size and shape. That’d be easy because these virtual worlds consist of 3-D models.
It’s more about what it feels like to touch someone’s skin, a piece of someone’s clothing, the surface of an object. It’s that kind of tactile information that many deaf-blind people go after, and it’s only that kind of tactile information that they’re interested in.
But how am I supposed to describe what it feels like to touch something that can’t be touched because it simply doesn’t have a physical real-life existence?
Okay, so that avatar is wearing a tweed jacket. But that tweed isn’t really tweed fabric. It’s a digital painting of tweed fabric on an object which actually has no material whatsoever and no physical properties whatsoever. You can’t reach out your hand and lay your fingertips on that jacket and feel it.
Even if that jacket’s surface was bump-mapped or normal-mapped, which it isn’t, it still couldn’t be touched and felt.
Now, someone could suggest I should describe what things would feel like if they were actually real in the physical realm. But I prefer my image descriptions to be accurate and, most importantly, truthful.
And besides, what about objects that do not have a texture that represents any real-life material? Not only are they without any physical properties, but they don’t even suggest any life-like physical properties. Even I don’t know what it’d feel like to touch them.
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@jupiter_rowland Can you imagine what unreal surfaces would feel like? For example, if it’s shiny or rough or looks plasticky, you could mentally conceive of what it might feel like, and then describe that.
You can make it clear in descriptions that you’re talking about virtual content and so the descriptions are speculative, and that would still be of value to a reader who otherwise gets nothing they can relate to.
@James Edwards That’d still be making stuff up. I only describe what’s actually really there, and what everything actually is like. You can’t touch them, you can’t feel them, and “what if” has no room in my image descriptions.
Besides, no, I don’t know what unreal surfaces would feel like, also because they lack any and all properties of real-life surfaces.
And if I had to think up what literal dozens of different surfaces in one image feel like, it’d take me even longer to write my image descriptions. And it already takes me from several hours upward to describe one image.
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@jupiter_rowland Yeah it would be making stuff up, but I mean (literally and figuratively speaking) – all stuff is made up.
Does it matter if a description only amounts to “what if”, if the alternative is no description at all?
The underlying question is about what might be useful for this group of users, but it seems to me that’s slightly at odds with a desire for strict empirical accuracy.
So maybe the question is – what’s more important?