Suz Hinton on Accessible images (AIMS)

In my latest experimentations in 'Guerilla Accessibility,' I stumbled upon this paper a mere two weeks after publication and was excited about the explorations in it. The ideas built upon an unlikely hero of the anti-surveillance field delighted me. There are wide implementation gaps that remain unaddressed in this paper, and I took liberty on these when implementing the algorithms. I'll be sharing both the triumphs and pitfalls of this proposed technique of improving the accessibility of online web content.

Transcript

2. a model to build self‐describing images for assisting screen reader users
3. Topics covered Web Accessibility Steganography techniques Browser Extensions
4. Web Accessibility
5. (A11y)
6. Screen Readers
7. Screen Readers JAWS NVDA VoiceOver Speakup TalkBack
8. Demo
9. <img src=“cat.jpg” alt=“grey cat asleep on a chair” />
10. <img src=“decorative.jpg” alt=“” />
11. Excerpt from Accessible images (AIMS): a model to build self‐describing images for assisting screen reader users
12. Pros + Ease of implementation + Works with any image MIME type + Supported in browsers since HTML 2
14. Cons – Requires coding knowledge – Decoupled from the actual image – Plenty* of devs have little to no a11y skills *presenter’s observation of peers from over 12 years of experience in front-end development field
17. May 16, 2006 newscientist.com/article/dn9177-gamers-help-the-blind-get-the-picture
19. Steganography
20. Steganography the practice of concealing messages or information within other nonsecret text or data.
25. there are many steganography techniques and approaches
26. + concealing text in images + using LSB method
27. 1 convert text to bits 2 store bits in LSBs of pixel data
28. close up photo of a lion facing to the left 99 1100011 ASCII character code
29. 20, 255, 102 0010100 LSB c 99 1100011 ASCII character code save! 1
33. Assumptions ? knowing length of alt text ? method to compute bit position in image
34. Knowing the length of alt text ? store length in consistent pixel location ? use special character to indicate end (EOF?) ? NLP (lol no)
35. Computing bit position in image ? use a PRNG with seed ? decoder needs to know the seed
36. Browser extension
37. Browser extension third party script that can run on pages loaded by a user
38. Browser extension a terrifying way to give third party code a same-origin policy waiver
41. Implementation noopkat.github.io/a11y-alt-stego
42. Pros + Description is portable with image + Less code + Less effort + Rad use of steganography
43. Cons – Single language restriction – Lossless image format required – Compression can destroy / corrupt data – Most significant human labor not removed – Opt-in, standard adoption challenges
44. thanks