Helping Our Website Viewers John,

I am not sure where to post this suggestion/comment so I put it in each of the forums. If this isn’t permissible, please delete it.

 

Hey folks, thought I’d pass along an experience I had today. Our neighbor, who lives across the street, dropped by to chat. They are new to the neighborhood (about a year) and we are getting to know them better each day. We knew that our neighbor is a marathoner. In fact, she was in the Boston race when the bomb went off. Fortunately, she was not injured. We also knew she is losing her sight. She has three young sons and she is going blind, tragic. Her sight was the reason for her visit.

Sometime back, Microsoft gave away free copies of “Windows Eyesâ€. It is Microsoft’s integrated screen reader. I had given her a copy so that she could use it on her computer. She had a few questions and wondered if I could help. I showed her how to do a few things and then decided to brag little about our Patriot Woodworker sight- as a way to illustrate how the program worked when using a web browser.

Everything was going great until we got to some of the images (one of them was mine!). The “reader†started speaking in “numbers†and “lettersâ€. What I discovered was that some of our images didn’t have descriptive names but rather “camera†names. Although the neighbor is not completely sightless, yet, it was confusing to her.

It got me to thinking about some of our members- like Lt. Fallon and how difficult it must be to use a computer. We can all help by making sure we rename our images before uploading them. Screen readers and visually members will thank you!

 

Lew

Lew

Never gave that a thought. I normally do name my pics when I post them, or even save them for all that goes. But those that have challenges is something I never thought about. Thanks for bringing this to my attention .

 

Wayne

I was the same way, Wayne.

 

Anything we can do to help those folks is a plus for all of us.

Thanks for the tip.  I know the name of my pieces and just never thought about actually changing the file name so that other folks would also get to know the name of the piece.  I just covered it in the description.  Thanks again.