Make your pictures more useful in your browser
Pictures can be a great way for people to learn where things are relative to other things. For example, a map can show you what countries border other countries. Pictures shown in the browser on your computer may have alternate text for the picture, which can be helpful if you're blind, but often there will no extra information about the different things shown in the picture.
But today a picture can provide extra information to your browser, so that as you move the cursor over the picture, the tooltip changes to say different things. For example, as you move your cursor over the map of South America below, the tooltip changes as you move from one country to the next.
If you have a screen reader running so that tooltips are spoken as they appear, you can learn where one country is relative to the other countries without actually seeing the picture. To give sighted visitors to this site a feel for this, they can turn on the Narrator screen reader and turn their monitors off, and move the cursor over the image. Alternatively they could move the cursor over the blank image below.
Creating these pictures yourself
You can create pictures like these yourself, using whatever picture you want. For example, maps, engineering diagrams, medical diagrams, or photographs. The picture can then be loaded into a browser, so the person looking at the picture doesn't need any new software running on their computer to have the tooltips appear.
One way to create the pictures is by using Microsoft Office Front Page 2003. In Front Page, you can insert an image file into a new web page and draw out the areas you're interested in on top of the picture. For each area that you draw out you can specify what tooltip you want to appear. You also add a link to a web page for each area. If you don't want a click on the area to change the page, then you can set the link to stay on the web page with the picture. The pictures above were created using Front Page.
How could this be made more helpful to you?
If you want to make pictures like these in a hurry, you may find it takes you more time than you have to draw out all the areas of interest in the picture. For example, if you're going to give a lecture and you want to create a number of pictures which can be used by the people attending the lecture. It may be that the Tablet PC could reduce the time it takes you to create all the pictures you need. With the Tablet PC, you should be able to quickly draw out these areas with the pen.
Do you this yourself, you can download a simple demonstration program called PictureHelper. To learn more about this, click here.
The image below shows the PictureHelper program with a number of regions already defined, and a region in the process of having text associated with it..
