LemonADA

This month I’ve been grinding through the mostly annoying** task of adding ADA alt-text to courseware. It’s annoying (as abovementioned) because there are few if any blind students in speech and hearing, and because this material is intrinsically visual, not amenable to verbal description.

The guidelines are vague, contradictory, and mandatory. You must obey but we won’t tell you what to obey. Good old Kafka.**

I’m trying to zip through this crap with as little pain as possible so I can start on the APPROPRIATE adaptation, turning the images into contours on paper and turning the animations into live contours in a tactile output device.

Still, there are a few drops of lemonADA. Running through old material in a different font or context is the BEST way to proofread. I’ve found a few places where the original text accompanying the image was inadequate or misplaced. The original edition is already in press and unchangeable, so I’m giving the blind students the advantage of a corrected or improved text.

Example: Page 18 of this lesson describes the inter-spike interval and ALSO describes phase-locking neurons.

Page 19 should have included the paragraph about phase-locking neurons. This paragraph doesn’t make much sense without the phase-locking part! I straightened it out in the alt-text for the Narrator.

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** My annoyance is boosted by knowing that ADA was one of the fine products in the Bush Family’s catalog. The same wonderful company gave us the “Clean” “Air” Act, a million dead foreigners in a dozen vicious demonic wars, 9/11, 2008, and the 2020 torture chamber, the biggest war crime in human history. All of those wonderful events were splendid high-quality gifts to the world from the noble beautiful Bush Family.