Subject: Re: Text "attributes"

From: <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 23 Jul 2003 10:40:51 -0700

On Wed, 23 Jul 2003 07:05:29 -0700 David Shaw <[email-masked]>
wrote:

>An interesting problem came up on one of the GnuPG mailing lists
>a
>little while ago, and I thought I'd mention it here.
>
>A vision-impaired user was using GnuPG via a text reader and mentioned
>that photo IDs were obviously not going to be that useful to him.
> The
>idea came up of using an additional attribute subpacket to include
>a
>textual user ID together with the photo attribute subpacket (both
>inside a single attribute ID), rather like the HTML "alt" tag is
>used
>to provide a text string for when an image can not be displayed.
>
>It would be easy enough to do: just define attribute subpacket 2
>as a
>UTF8 string type.  Implementations could handle it however they
>chose.
>
>Note that I'm not necessarily suggesting this for 2440bis.  Just
>something to think about in the future.

along those lines,
it might be helpful to such users to have an 'audio id'
(the key signer's greeting in his/her own voice, [possibly together with
a few other spoken sounds, enough to enable a text-to-speech synthesis
in that voice, so that the receiver can hear each pgp message read in
the voice of that sender]),
 
the text reader can do the implementation from the saved audio id attribute
(which can display the 'text' only attribute for deaf users who have
no use for the audio component)

for anyone interested in implementation specifically with the needs of
the disabled in mind,
here is a good site of helpful links:

http://www.wata.org/resource/highlighted_links.htm

with Respect,

vedaal

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---

From: David Shaw <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 25 Jul 2003 08:22:34 -0400

On Wed, Jul 23, 2003 at 10:40:51AM -0700, [email-masked] wrote:

> >An interesting problem came up on one of the GnuPG mailing lists a
> >A vision-impaired user was using GnuPG via a text reader and
> >mentioned that photo IDs were obviously not going to be that useful
> >to him.  The idea came up of using an additional attribute
> >subpacket to include a textual user ID together with the photo
> >attribute subpacket (both inside a single attribute ID), rather
> >like the HTML "alt" tag is used to provide a text string for when
> >an image can not be displayed.
> >
> >It would be easy enough to do: just define attribute subpacket 2 as
> >a UTF8 string type.  Implementations could handle it however they
> >chose.
> >
> along those lines, it might be helpful to such users to have an
> 'audio id' (the key signer's greeting in his/her own voice,
> [possibly together with a few other spoken sounds, enough to enable
> a text-to-speech synthesis in that voice, so that the receiver can
> hear each pgp message read in the voice of that sender]),

I don't think that including speech sounds to enable text-to-speech is
appropriate in a OpenPGP key, but I'm not against a generic sound
attribute.  I imagine it could be used (among other things) as a "Hi
there, this is David, and my fingerprint is ABCD..."

It is of course more complex than text since we'd need to pick at
least one sound format to use (WAV? AU? MP3? something else?)  It is
also large.

(Again, just speculating idly about the future - not talking about
2440bis here).

David