Re: Authoring Tool Recommendations?

SoftQaud's HoTMetaL 5, Allaire's HomeSite, are two pieces of Software I have
heard good reports about, although I have not been able to test them for
myself. W3C's Amaya creates clean HTML, and as WYSIWYG editor's go it is not
bad, although it is not very accessible itself at the moment. I use it, and
it allows pretty well any accessible authoring practice, and provides clean
valid HTML 4.0, which is nice. Othrewise, familiarity with HTML and a text
editor that supports HTML (emacs, dreamweaver, cyberstudio, hotdog, and many
other popular editing tools fall into this category) are a good idea.

One of the reasons for the Authoring Tools group to try and review
implementations is to e able to anser just such questions. I agree that it
would be nice if there were easy answers. On the other hand, collecting these
requests is going to assist developers in justifying the work to make their
tools compliant, which will also help the situation.

Charles McCN

On Thu, 16 Sep 1999, Kynn Bartlett wrote:

  I just got off the phone with one of the Deans of Orange Coast
  College (a southern california junior college) -- if you've been
  following Cynthia Waddell's posts on IG, you know that California
  community colleges are required to attain at least level single A
  compliance with the WCAG.
  
  The chap who called me said that his technical people advised
  against using FrontPage 98 because it didn't produce accessible
  web pages -- and he wants to know what does.
  
  I didn't have an answer.  I still don't have an answer.  The HTML
  authoring tool industry should be ashamed of the fact that I don't
  have an answer.  But at least this group is working toward that
  goal.
  
  I know that we will complete our guidelines, and I know that we
  will be able to evaluate existing tools against our standards, and
  I know we'll have a "what's okay and what's bad and what's better"
  answer soon -- "soon" being on the order of several months.
  
  Right now, though, Orange Coast College needs an answer -- they
  want to do the right thing, they just want to know what that is.
  They want to know which software they should start training their
  instructors to use.
  
  Anyone got an answer that's more useful than mine?  I mumbled something
  about FrontPage being not quite as bad as it used to be, and about
  Dreamweaver apparently being decent -- but I don't use a web editor
  myself (all coded by hand or via perl script) so I have no direct
  experience.
  
  Thoughts?
  
  -- 
  Kynn Bartlett  <kynn@idyllmtn.com>                   http://www.kynn.com/
  Chief Technologist, Idyll Mountain Internet      http://www.idyllmtn.com/
  Catch the Web Accessibility Meme!                   http://aware.hwg.org/
  

--Charles McCathieNevile            mailto:charles@w3.org
phone: +1 617 258 0992   http://www.w3.org/People/Charles
W3C Web Accessibility Initiative    http://www.w3.org/WAI
MIT/LCS  -  545 Technology sq., Cambridge MA, 02139,  USA

Received on Thursday, 16 September 1999 21:30:48 UTC