Re: What are we doing about Problem #1?

At 25/06/98 11:55 AM , William Loughborough wrote:
>In Jan's paper at http://www.utoronto.ca/atrc/rd/hm/3tions.htm is a
>'summary statement': "...it seems clear that published guidelines and
>pleas for cooperation have been ineffective in increasing the actual use
>of accessible HTML authoring practices on the Web. In order to change
>this state of affairs, the accessible HTML community must win the
>cooperation of the most popular Web authoring product makers..."
>
>WL:: Shouldn't this be our highest priority, instead of yet another set
>of improved guidelines?  Anybody got any ideas of how to improve our
>results in this area?

Mostly I lurk here, but I felt I had to reply to this, since SoftQuad's
HoTMetaL is one of the few (maybe the only?) authoring tool with
accessibility prompting support. We have a reasonably popular tool, but I
don't know if anyone bought it because of the accessiblity; it's hard to
find out. 

One thing I do know - if magazine reviews of HTML authoring tools contained
information on accessibility, pointing out which tools help create
accessible sites, and journalists could be persuaded not to yawn when we
show them the accessibility features, and web-site makers could be told
that people on slow modem lines might have money to spend on their products
anyway.... then you would find the authoring tool makers happy to put
effort into adding accessibility features. Customer demand is the best
solution. There is no point to authoring tools adding support if no-one is
going to use it.

I don't know what the real solution is - for a while I sent email to lots
of big commercial sites pointing out their deficiencies. I got back lots of
email saying they'd redo their sites; usually when I went back the sites
were worse from an accessibility perspective. Maybe it would help if lots
of people sent email to these sites - customer demand probably would help
there too. And then we'd get the trickle-down effects to the tools.


Lauren

Received on Friday, 26 June 1998 19:02:41 UTC