Images and the blind

This is old news (about a month), but due to the extraordinary nature of this issue, I decided to share it anyway. I received an interesting email from someone who’s completely blind. He told me that he couldn’t read the ASCII-table of the manual because it’s there as an image. Now that you think about it, there’s really no reason why the same table couldn’t be illustrated in text as well, and therefore be available to those few who are actually using special equipment to read information on “screen”. In today’s Windows world ASCII-tables are quite irrelevant apart from console applications, so the last 128 characters of the table weren’t even presented in their original DOS-symbols.

Funnily enough, most of the ASCII-tables you’ll find when you browse, for example, results of a Google search, are indeed images. Is it because it’s easier to generate the codes of each individual characters in a form of a table on some “canvas” and then simply screencapture it? Or is it just so much more work to write the HTML-table generation within the loop that iterates the character codes? Maybe we’re just lazy. Either way, I’ll make sure that the next ANSI-table within CoolBasic V3 manual is in pure text format.