Possible Technique?

I'm not sure if this is a good suggestion or not, but one of
the "extra credit" assignments for my accessibility class was
to look over the AU WG draft and give any feedback they felt
qualified to give -- as possible end users (sorry, "authors")
of the authoring tools.

One student suggested the following:

START QUOTE

Beth Devers - 12:25pm Mar 7, 1999 (1.)  
Week 3 Extra Credit

Why don't the HTML authoring tools automatically generate text
alternative pages? I recently converted a powerpoint presentation
to HTML and with one click, alternative text pages were generated!
Some changes had to be made, but the ease of page creation made the
task so much easier.

END QUOTE

Do we want to recommend this as a technique for creating accessible
web pages, akin to the "if all else fails..."?  Or would this be
a distracting technique?  (It seems to me that my personal goal is
to make all pages accessible, and not produce a "ghettoized" set
of text pages when true HTML _should_ be accessible in and of
itself; on the other hand, I can see where a simple option to auto-
matically create a set of text-only pages and link to them as part
of the document could vastly increase the accessibility of a large
amount of content.)
 
--
Kynn Bartlett  <kynn@idyllmtn.com>                   http://www.kynn.com/
Chief Technologist, Idyll Mountain Internet      http://www.idyllmtn.com/
Professional ALT-text author                     http://www.kynn.com/+alt
Spring 1999 Virtual Dog Show!                     http://www.dogshow.com/
WWTBLD?  Validate your HTML!                     http://validator.w3.org/

Received on Friday, 12 March 1999 20:23:45 UTC