Bridging the information gap

There is an information gap that severely restricts the lives of blind and visually impaired people. The author set up Describe Online in April 2000 to develop new solutions to this information gap through online text descriptions, improving accessibility of websites and revising product manuals to make them more informative to purchasers. Experience to date has revealed a spectrum of situations for which both tactile diagrams and text descriptions are both desirable and complementary. Whilst a tactile diagram should always be accompanied by some text annotation, at least to the extent of that which normally accompanies print diagrams, some text descriptions can be stand-alone and may be the only practical way to convey the necessary information. The converse is also true, there are many instances where text alone cannot convey the subtlety which could be presented via a tactile approach. The author wishes to explore this topic to see if criteria can be developed that could inform content providers of the extent to which these two complementary approaches should be adopted for each practical situation.