accessibility...

[ratcreature]

So I've seen Missed the Saturday Dance by zoetrope recced several times on my f-list, and I get why people like the multimedia, and it's kind of cool and what not, and I like a mix of images and text (or I wouldn't love comics) and the video and sound is neat too. And I love AUs anyway. However, that choice to display much of the story text that is letters

Comments

[akacat]

I have the same complaint for a different reason -- I don't like to read fic on my laptop. If a fic is all (or mostly) text, I can easily dump it onto my PDA to read.

And strictly on the ocd side of things, I like to know how long the story I'm reading is. With no file size, word count or even a list of the pages, I don't have a clue.

[ratcreature]

Yeah, there is that too. But I can see how someone would be willing to loose readers for realizing a multimedia concept, so I get why it's not put all in one file, with the images imbedded into the text, though I'd find that more convenient. But an extra link to text versions of the letters as alternative wouldn't even have affected the presentation concept at all. And that way everybody could have at least read the actual text parts of the story.

[mamadeb]

Thank you! I had the same problems - the story tied me to my computer without *any* clue as to how long I'd be so tied. I also wasn't fond of needing to be told *how* to access the story.

And they got a major historical fact wrong, and that just tossed me out of the story - the USAF didn't officially exist as an independent entity until 1947. Until then, it was the Army Air Corp, and occasionally, the Army Air Force (we have a picture of my father-in-law, then a corporal, with his unit, the 11th Army Air Force Band.)

I got back in, and I thought it was a good story, except that I'm still not sure what the audio files added to the story and the text portions would have worked as well as, well, text. And I'm not rushing to read it again.

[thepouncer]

Echoing the distaste at not knowing how long the story is, and at the small size of the images with text and no alternative, but also, I'm so glad to know I'm not the only one thrown by the use of Air Force. I tried to fanwank that it really meant the Royal Air Force, but it quickly became apparent that that wouldn't fly either. I was tired last night, and stopped reading with the intention to go back someday, but it won't be today or probably any time within the week.

[bethbethbeth]

So very in agreement.

I love the concept, and the story starts out promisingly, but I've stopped reading because the letters are just too small for me to read. Honeslty, I'd have to hold a magnifying glass up to the screen to keep from getting a massive headache.

[ratcreature]

For me it wasn't just that they were small, but the old typewriter effect made them fuzzy in addition to beig small, and it's not as if small writing on screens it the most crisp to begin with. I liked the look, but it would have been great if you could have clicked on the letter image and got a plain text pop-up with actual text or something, and that wouldn't even have affected the design concept.

[bethbethbeth]

I wrote to her, so...let's see.

(with my luck, my note will be totally misinterpreted, and I'll be on fandom_wank by nightfall *G*)

[ratcreature]

Well, I gave feedback in her LJ as well.

[mecurtin]

If we're all being bitchy honest here

[ratcreature]

The *structure* of the work is wonderful, and the integration of art & story is great, but if you extract the story from the AV materials it's not very good and certainly would not garner the kind of praise it's been getting.

Well yeah, but then artwork and vids on their own are also a lot of work and get feedback as fanworks in their own right, so I don't really see it as disproportionate that a skillful combination would get more than each of the parts alone. And I'm honestly not that nitpicky wrt AUs myself, so I probably wouldn't be bothered that much by any of your objections.

[mecurtin]

I love AUs, but I am nitpicky about them, in some ways even more than about canon-based stories. In a historical AU like this the world has to hang together *more* than it does in TPTB's canon universe.

What's making me cranky is that the work has a fair number of textual sloppinesses & weaknesses, and yet if you scan the FB people are using words like "perfect".

*grumble grumble grumble*

[_inbetween_]

I was briefly considering exporting the images to PS, but ...
While you're at it *waves vaguely at active people mailing suggestions* I thought that a seperate link to the video would also be cool. I "forwarded" the clip to my own email addy to watch it less pixelated on YouTube but maybe other people would still profit from a link.

[ratcreature]

Yeah, I thought about trying to enlarge the images too, but my browser doesn't have straight image zoom, and there were so many letters that it would have been a pain to load them all into an extra graphics program. And I'm not even sure it would have been more readable by being just made into a larger fuzzy typeface without additional enhancing.