Powerpoint from Last Week's NWUDC event

RantWoman calls her readers' attention to this announcement which previously appeared.

NWUDC event January 14 about Walkability

RantWoman celebrates the appearance on the city website of the Powerpoint presentation from the above eventavailable at Seattle DOT Presentation for NWUDC
RantWoman notes:

The presentation drawn on the Powerpoint here has LOTS of really interesting terminology and concepts and RantWoman encourages people to refer to it.

Obligatory moment of RantWoman grumpiness, just to maintain RantWoman standards: the downloadable file has Powerpoint slides 4 to a page. This limits people's options for better access by printing the slides in full-page size.

RantWoman read through most of the presentation quickly with JAWS. As with many engineering processes, there appear to be a number of graphics that lack either labels or extensive description. However, as with much visual information, concise descriptions might be hard to come up with. Blind people who really want to understand many of the drawings would probably benefit from asking someone for audio explanations.

RantWoman was thinking of emailing a suggestion: even if many things on the city website might have a lot of untagged graphics, this is definitely something that should be well-tagged. But then RantWoman looked up close at the complex drawings and decided that the "Ask a human" option should take precedence.

Speaking of "Ask a human," there is a LOT of construction on 5th Avenue on one walking route to the Seattle Municipal Tower. It is noisy. There are rows of large orange construction barriers in either the middle or one lane of Fifth Avenue. It's basically an ugly hard to navigate mess in the daytime and RantWoman would just use something like Google Earth and an app or a trusted human for help.. Recently RantWoman did manage an evening walk when the construction sites were quiet and the walking routes were actually comparatively easy to find: thank you responsible construction practices.

RantWoman thinks it is not terrible sometimes to recognize the limits of higher-tech options than something that makes it easy to ask a human for help. There are several apps that allow blind people to submit links to visual info and receive audio feedback from a live but remote human. In this case, if Google Earth is good enough for the Seattle Department of Transportation, using Google Earth with  one of these audio feedback apps at times is probably the best option as part of wayfinding for blind people.

RantWoman expects to offer opinions about a couple other items from this Powerpoint but definitely recommends checking it out.