Through Lattice Windows: Word Play
"As a user of screen-reading software, I have a rather different view of websites from sighted users. Instead of graphic images and logos, I encounter headings and labels. Everything is described in words, including technical terms that most visual users are never even aware of,'' writes ace columnist Leanne Hunt.
When my first follower on Twitter joined me and I clicked on her profile picture, it read "Pretty girl with blonde hair". I was enchanted, supposing that the computer was working out its own method of labelling … but I think not. Captions are attached to photographs by the photographer or the web site designer. Thus, a blog post entitled "Emotional Rainbows" is accompanied by the note, "beauty-of-fall.jpg", and this helps to follow the sense of the narrative.
As a result of having things read to me by a digital voice, I occasionally have some laughs. The text-reader is generally very good, but every now and again it says things which take my imagination off on a tangent. In my reading about book marketing, for example, I came frequently upon references to a website which sounded like "gooder ads". I was so excited about the power of this website that I told several people about it … only to realise, in a moment of quiet reflection, that the website's name must in fact, be "goodreads"!
Last week, a friend asked me to send him a link to my blog by email. It so happened that I had spent the day contacting service agents at the Apple iStore and talking about iPods and iPads, so that when this person gave his email address as "@icon", I saw "iCon". This gave rise to some interesting speculation. What, in the Apple repertoire of applications, was iCon? A conference tool? A contact list? An aid to contemplation? Neither did it end there. When I realised my mistake and told him about it, my imagination supplied yet another twist on the word. I wanted to ask him, "Do you con?"
Listening to people talk about things like chatrooms, the cloud, whisper-sync, pokes and cookies, to name a few, can bring to mind a dizzying array of associations. I am doing my best to keep up with my teenage daughters and "speak IT" [that would be "information technology", not "it" as such], but I confess to embarrassing myself frequently. YouTube has so far been the worst. Apart from calling it "uTubes" on account of getting it mixed up with iTunes, I can't help linking it in my mind to a cross between the u-bend in the toilet and a hysterectomy!
Thank goodness for people with a sense of humour who can put me right.
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Do visit Leanne's engaging Web site Diamond Panes http://diamondpanes.blogspot.com/
