accessibility...

[ratcreature]

So I've seen Missed the Saturday Dance by zoetrope recced several times on my f-list, and I get why people like the multimedia, and it's kind of cool and what not, and I like a mix of images and text (or I wouldn't love comics) and the video and sound is neat too. And I love AUs anyway. However, that choice to display much of the story text that is letters as graphics may be visually cool, but it really grates on me that the images don't come with an alt-attribute or a link to a text version of the letters.

I get that full transcriptions of video, sound, and image parts in a multimedia story for accessibility are not very practical, and it's not like I expect fanfic to go that far, but those letters are already text. And text that is an integral part of the narrative too. And it's just too small to read comfortably for me on a screen, especially with the typewriter effect, and I'm not even visually impaired or anything. Some stories displaying letters like that provide accessible alternatives, sheafrotherdon for example did in one of her Farm in Iowa stories, and I very much liked that, since I could take a look at the visual of the letter, then read the text in a comfortable font at a comfortable size.

With as much work as went into the presentation Missed the Saturday Dance, and I agree that it looks very nice indeed, how difficult could it have been to provide a link to a transcribed text of the all those letters as well, and make it possible for more people to enjoy it?

Comments

[catmoran.livejournal.com]

I have the same complaint for a different reason -- I don't like to read fic on my laptop. If a fic is all (or mostly) text, I can easily dump it onto my PDA to read.

And strictly on the ocd side of things, I like to know how long the story I'm reading is. With no file size, word count or even a list of the pages, I don't have a clue.

[ratcreature]

Yeah, there is that too. But I can see how someone would be willing to loose readers for realizing a multimedia concept, so I get why it's not put all in one file, with the images imbedded into the text, though I'd find that more convenient. But an extra link to text versions of the letters as alternative wouldn't even have affected the presentation concept at all. And that way everybody could have at least read the actual text parts of the story.

[mamadeb.livejournal.com]

Thank you! I had the same problems - the story tied me to my computer without *any* clue as to how long I'd be so tied. I also wasn't fond of needing to be told *how* to access the story.

And they got a major historical fact wrong, and that just tossed me out of the story - the USAF didn't officially exist as an independent entity until 1947. Until then, it was the Army Air Corp, and occasionally, the Army Air Force (we have a picture of my father-in-law, then a corporal, with his unit, the 11th Army Air Force Band.)

I got back in, and I thought it was a good story, except that I'm still not sure what the audio files added to the story and the text portions would have worked as well as, well, text. And I'm not rushing to read it again.

[thepouncer.livejournal.com]

Echoing the distaste at not knowing how long the story is, and at the small size of the images with text and no alternative, but also, I'm so glad to know I'm not the only one thrown by the use of Air Force. I tried to fanwank that it really meant the Royal Air Force, but it quickly became apparent that that wouldn't fly either. I was tired last night, and stopped reading with the intention to go back someday, but it won't be today or probably any time within the week.

[ratcreature]

It is a bit dissonant that for some aspects so much effort went into it, kind of for lots of "bells and whistles" stuff, but for some more basic aspects, like basic accessibility for the core story on the formalist design side and basic facts on the storytelling side, less care was taken. It's kind of backwards, isn't it?

[thepouncer.livejournal.com]

I was shocked that such a basic fact wouldn't have been caught in beta. Or that there apparently wasn't enough research done to inform the writing on that particular point. It does seem odd to me, that so much care went into the graphics and presentation while the content languished. Of course, I haven't finished the story yet, so perhaps my opinion will change, but so far I'm not wowed.

[ratcreature]

I enjoyed the audio and video for setting the atmosphere, though I'm not sure how much they tied into anything later.

[bethbethbeth.livejournal.com]

So very in agreement.

I love the concept, and the story starts out promisingly, but I've stopped reading because the letters are just too small for me to read. Honeslty, I'd have to hold a magnifying glass up to the screen to keep from getting a massive headache.

[ratcreature]

For me it wasn't just that they were small, but the old typewriter effect made them fuzzy in addition to beig small, and it's not as if small writing on screens it the most crisp to begin with. I liked the look, but it would have been great if you could have clicked on the letter image and got a plain text pop-up with actual text or something, and that wouldn't even have affected the design concept.

[bethbethbeth.livejournal.com]

I wrote to her, so...let's see.

(with my luck, my note will be totally misinterpreted, and I'll be on fandom_wank by nightfall *G*)

[ratcreature]

Well, I gave feedback in her LJ as well.

[isiscolo.livejournal.com]

Oh, I'm glad it wasn't just me! I was squinting at the screen and thinking, "damn, time for reading glasses, eh?"

Of course, you're my age, so... :-)

[ratcreature]

I commented in her LJ about the trouble I had reading, and she now put a plain text file up with all text parts from the letters and such, the link is in this comment:
http://zoetrope.livejournal.com/117711.html?thread=1218255
if it isn't (yet?) linked somewhere on the story site.

[bethbethbeth.livejournal.com]

Geezers of the world, unite!

[mecurtin.livejournal.com]

If we're all being bitchy honest here --

Zoe's visual and audio artistry is extraordinary -- the latter in particular is very rare -- but she's only OK as a writer. I've seen this before with other people with a very strong visual focus: for them, text is more a type of illustration than a way to tell a story. I dithered quite a bit before giving feedback that pointed out one typo and a historical inaccuracy, but there were quite a few other narrative/style points I had trouble with, too.

The *structure* of the work is wonderful, and the integration of art & story is great, but if you extract the story from the AV materials it's not very good and certainly would not garner the kind of praise it's been getting.

You can see it from the very first page of the regular narrative, where the first impression McKay gets of Sheppard is "a deep, lazy voice". This threw me out right away, because I'd just listened to the audio trailers which reminded me of how very not-deep JF's voice is.

But that's only one example of style issues. More serious story issues involve things like: why is Rodney here? How can it be WWII and Rodney *not* be at Bletchly Park or part of the Manhattan Project? And the whole kidnapping-to-Italy thing makes *no sense*.

[ratcreature]

The *structure* of the work is wonderful, and the integration of art & story is great, but if you extract the story from the AV materials it's not very good and certainly would not garner the kind of praise it's been getting.

Well yeah, but then artwork and vids on their own are also a lot of work and get feedback as fanworks in their own right, so I don't really see it as disproportionate that a skillful combination would get more than each of the parts alone. And I'm honestly not that nitpicky wrt AUs myself, so I probably wouldn't be bothered that much by any of your objections.

[mecurtin.livejournal.com]

I love AUs, but I am nitpicky about them, in some ways even more than about canon-based stories. In a historical AU like this the world has to hang together *more* than it does in TPTB's canon universe.

What's making me cranky is that the work has a fair number of textual sloppinesses & weaknesses, and yet if you scan the FB people are using words like "perfect".

*grumble grumble grumble*

[http://users.livejournal.com/_inbetween_/]

I was briefly considering exporting the images to PS, but ...
While you're at it *waves vaguely at active people mailing suggestions* I thought that a seperate link to the video would also be cool. I "forwarded" the clip to my own email addy to watch it less pixelated on YouTube but maybe other people would still profit from a link.

[ratcreature]

Yeah, I thought about trying to enlarge the images too, but my browser doesn't have straight image zoom, and there were so many letters that it would have been a pain to load them all into an extra graphics program. And I'm not even sure it would have been more readable by being just made into a larger fuzzy typeface without additional enhancing.