The Reading Room

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Rand al'Thor

6:18 AM

@Bookworm russian-literature is now eligible for tag badges.

Gallifreyan and DrTyrsa are the closest.

user185131

7:15 AM

@Brahadeesh Here's another candidate for marking faq:

user185131

Q: Guidelines for good story-ID answers?

I've found the solution to somebody's story-identification question, and I'd like to write up an answer. What can I do to make my answer as helpful and high-quality as possible? This post is a companion to Guidelines for good story-id questions?; both asking and answering are skills which can be...

Knight

9:53 AM

@Randal'Thor @Tsundoku Can you please look up into this matter?

Well the human translator you have used gives out what he thinks, what if it dosen't mean that? — Arjun 2 days ago

Bookworm

10:40 AM

Q: How did the dwarves possibly "dig out" gigantic hallways in the mountains to create Moria with such "primitive" technology?

I've just come out from Moria with the Fellowship of the Ring. They didn't quite see or hear me, but I was hovering around there and mentally "saw" their journey through reading about it in text form. What strikes me is how dwarves long ago, even in the context of the story, somehow were able to ...

the-lord-of-the-rings

1 hour later…

Gareth Rees

11:47 AM

@Brahadeesh I see that you are going through questions with images and adding alt text (for example). This seems like a great thing to do!

I think the descriptions could be improved though -- in this example you've written "Google Trends 'Interest' in Atlas Shrugged, 2004–2018" but this just repeats information that is already in the surrounding text and so is not likely to be helpful to someone using a screen reader. Best practice for image descriptions is to describe what the image looks like, not just what it represents

Napoleon Wilson

I struggled to understand why the whitespace makes an additional border necessary, though. If anything, it would seem it alleviates the necessity for an additional border upto ven makes more wasted space problematic. But I decided to just skip the edit suggestion.

user185131

Yes, I came across the Meta discussion and thought it would be a good thing to tackle the problem, one post a day. I appreciate the feedback, I wasn't really sure what I was getting right and what I was not.

Tsundoku

In the case of the Google trends image, the description is below the image; so the alt tet can say, "Google Trends 'Interest' in Atlas Shrugged, 2004–2018; see description below".

user185131

@NapoleonWilson I felt the makeshift border helped my eyes focus better on the text, but if it's distracting please remove it.

Gareth Rees

In this case there was no description in the surrounding text, so you might write something like "the frequency of Avernus peaks at about one in two million in 1819 and declines gradually to about one in twenty million in 2000" thus describing the relevant data that appears in the figure but not the text

Napoleon Wilson

11:57 AM

@Randal'Thor If only the question was about Russian literature. ;-)

user185131

@GarethRees Ah, I think I understand better now... Right, I'll keep this in mind.

Gareth Rees

It helps to try out a screen reader for yourself and find out what it is like to use!

user185131

smacks myself on the head Should have considered that sooner!

Tsundoku

Screen readers are complex pieces of software with many shortcuts and take some time to master. Here is a tutorial from the W3C. However, wherever it says "longdesc" or "long description" (for complex images), those techniques need to be replaced with a description above or below the image.

And using a screen reader on a site as complex as Stack Exchange is not going to be fun.

Tsundoku

12:28 PM

I added a bullet point on how to write meaningful image descriptions to Gallifreyan's answer.

2 hours later…

Tsundoku

2:47 PM

@Bookworm Why isn't that fictional world more realistic? Reminds me of Why didn't character X act more rationally?

1 hour later…

Gareth Rees

3:52 PM

@Bookworm This is someone who is looking for fan fiction.

4 hours later…

Rand al'Thor

7:24 PM

@Tsundoku On the other hand, this isn't just any fantasy author. Given the breadth of Tolkien's worldbuilding, I wouldn't be surprised if that question is answerable. (Wouldn't be surprised if it isn't either, though. He was more interested in languages than technology.)

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