Accessibility issues on the Tablet PC today
The unique nature of the Tablet PC raises some Accessibility issues today. Particularly the fact that the Tablet PC makes it more common for information to be conveyed through ink, rather than through text. For example, the following images show ink being used as handwriting, and also as annotations to text.
In some cases the handwriting recognition on the Tablet PC today can do a good job at converting the ink to the text that you expect. For this to happen, in general the ink needs to be legible and horizontal. If the ink is not laid out neatly and legibly, or if drawings are mingled with the handwriting, the recognition of the ink may not result in anything like what you expected.
So if you added ink to an E-mail message and had the recognized text automatically sent with E-mail message, without you ever knowing what the recognized text was, this may be confusing for the person who receives the E-mail if they use the recognized text for something. Because of this, it isn't necessarily useful for the recognized text to become the alternate text for the ink in E-mail. What's more, it may not be obvious that the recognized text wasn't what the sender intended to say in the message, and the message could become misleading.
If you have ideas on how the Tablet PC could be made more helpful here, please send your ideas to Barker@Herbi.org.
For more information about reading ink in E-mail in Microsoft Outlook 2003 click here.