Image sizes in epub

[odedta]

Originally Posted by Hitch

I'm sorry--why do you think that this is completely wrong? What do you believe qualifies as "alternative" text? I mean, use your own example--you have a picture with a house that shows clearly on the image that it's house #10 on X street, say, a placard next to the door, saying "10 Smith Street."

According to what you've written, if I understand you, you think the alt should read "10." Or "10 Smith Street."

But if Jane Doe, a blind reader, is reading this book, and the book reading app tells her that the image is "10," what on earth does that mean to her? Or even "10 Smith Street?" If it were me (and I listen to some books when working out), I certainly don't want some mystery item dropped into the book. I'd expect it to say "an image of a house with the placard 10 Smith Street shown next to the door." How else would the blind person put the image in context?

I'd agree that adding alt attributes to a fleuron is a waste of everyone's time, including the reader. But what, if a clue is an image of some jumbled letters, should the alt be "letters?" "Numbers?" If the clue is important to (say, a detective) story, shouldn't the blind reader or listener have the same opportunity to solve the case as the sighted reader?

Perhaps there's some value to having a discussion about what the "alt" should be on a website, but for ebooks, it's OBVIOUSLY to give the user something useful in the context of the book, not simply something "alternative." In this use, the "alternative" means, "a way of understanding the image for the book," not some weirdo "alternative" thing that is irrelevant or WORSE to the book.

Hitch (who is profoundly confused by this argument about alt).

Thanks Hitch for saying the words I couldn't.

[Hitch]

Originally Posted by odedta

Thanks Hitch for saying the words I couldn't.

Awwww, thanks, odedta, but honestly, I was really, really asking him. What he (she) said has confused me. Truly.

It's my new acronym, at the office. It's driving my staff nuts (okay, nut-tier than usual), "WHAT THE ALT!?" Now I run around and leave "WTA?" on their desks and computer screens. mwahahahahahah.

LOL. (You can tell how close to Chanukah/Xmas we are...I get nuttier and loonier by the day. We are all so sleep-deprived here we look like the extras from a really dreadful zombie movie!)

Hitch

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by Jellby

I'd rather have a pause that a voice reading "section break". The text-to-speech is supposed to read the book's content, not to dictate the structure for the listener to recreate the book in Sigil

I'd rather have section break read out then a pause that tells me nothing at all.

[Hitch]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

I'd rather have section break read out then a pause that tells me nothing at all.

Now, THIS is a topic that I can see obviously has legs. It's an interesting question--is "scene-break" more intrusive than nothing, or dead air?

Hitch

[odedta]

Haha

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by Hitch

Now, THIS is a topic that I can see obviously has legs. It's an interesting question--is "scene-break" more intrusive than nothing, or dead air?

Hitch

Of course, we could have read out "This dead air is to signify a section break." just like you get on a blank page that has printed "This page left intentionally blank.".

[Toxaris]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

Of course, we could have read out "This dead air is to signify a section break." just like you get on a blank page that has printed "This page left intentionally blank.".

That message always irritate me to the maximum. If you print words on a page, it is no longer blank. That sentence is so wrong...

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by Toxaris

That message always irritate me to the maximum. If you print words on a page, it is no longer blank. That sentence is so wrong...

I always those it was silly to tell me the page is blank and in doing so, it's no longer blank.

As for image sizes in ePub, with high-resolution devices such as the H2O and Voyage (and then we go down to HD devices such as Aura, T3, PW), images should be fairly high resolution of on such devices, the images won't have enough resolution to be seen properly. As it is, we get maps that are too small for even older Readers with only 800x600 resolution. A high resolution image will scale will to a low resolution device, but it won't scale up well. So start off high resolution and you'll be good to go on a number of devices.

Also, lets not forget high resolution screens such as tablets and the Surface pro 2 & 3. Screens are high resolution these days, let's make the images fit well.

[DaleDe]

Originally Posted by Hitch

Now, THIS is a topic that I can see obviously has legs. It's an interesting question--is "scene-break" more intrusive than nothing, or dead air?

Hitch

I think a scene break is good if TTS is expected to read the page since a pause is impossible in TTS. Either is good for the human reader but scene break is not wrong since that is what the author intended.

Dale

[frostschutz]

alt="...meanwhile, in the dark forest of Grendoch..."

Why is a pause impossible in TTS, that's just weird.

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by frostschutz

alt="...meanwhile, in the dark forest of Grendoch..."

Why is a pause impossible in TTS, that's just weird.

Have you ever heard TTS pause without having to insert some sort of code to tell the TTS to pause? an eBook won't have any code in it to tell the TTS to pause as scene breaks. So using alt="scene break" to get the words "scene break" read is a good thing.

[Jellby]

There are CSS properties to affect TTS, including pauses (http://www.w3schools.com/cssref/css_ref_aural.asp)

If TTS systems in ebook readers don't honor them, it's their fault, an users should complain.

[DaleDe]

Originally Posted by Jellby

There are CSS properties to affect TTS, including pauses (http://www.w3schools.com/cssref/css_ref_aural.asp)

If TTS systems in ebook readers don't honor them, it's their fault, an users should complain.

Have you ever seen any ePub reader that supports this? Very interesting, by the way. This is likely for dedicated hardware.

[Jellby]

I have no experience with TTS, and have no idea what readers support or not, but I assume the support is much worse than for visual CSS.