h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Just jumping on board. I totally agree with this campaign. Whilst I was writing my peer review entry on the Valkyrie space craft here,

http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/brunel/A8792427

I was desperate to refer to a drawing showing the ship to make up for the limitation the english language! Then again I'm a design engineer and I'd have got shot if I didn't include diagrams in the essays I wrote at university!

What about the visually impaired using screen readers? There are some benefits to a text-only system.

So if you did have diagrams you'd still need a text explanation. (This could, of course, also appear on the pda platform.)

TRiG.

I've had that point thrown back at me in the past as an excuse as to why nothing should change. To which *my* response has been that if we all adopted that kind of thinking, the Internet would still be running on dumb terminals.

The real reason is that the editorial board have a predominantly humanities bias. In fact, I don't know of *anybody* who has had a science background. Arts graduates, in my considerbgal experience, tend to be a lot less rounded than scientists: the latter can and do write arts-based entries but I can't think of one humanities grad who could write a science entry.

Erm, did I say nothing should change? I said that we'd still need the text of the article to be complete of itself without the diagrams. In that case, the visually impaired will be well served *and* we don't have to worry about the PDA version being deficient.

So, though the introduction of diagrams to Edited Entries may well enhance the site, it wouldn't reduce the amount of work that needed to be done.

TRiG.

No, you didn't say that nothing should change. What I have said is that the argument you make has been used to defend the status quo.