School tool(s)

To the group:

Recently, I directed some questions to Charles McCathieNevile 
regarding Amaya and he encouraged me to bring the topic here, to this 
list, for group input. Thank you in advance for the opportunity.

I am helping a local school develop their web presence. As part of 
this project, though, I need to leave them able to maintain the site 
themselves (with occasional monitoring by me) and I am searching for 
a best authoring tool for them to use. All students at the school are 
blind or low-vision.

Several teachers and a few students will need to do the work, and my 
hope is to find a program that allows them to work in a text-editing 
environment and apply style sheets and formatting while relying on 
the program to generate code that meets accessibility guidelines. 
(I'll provide templates and models so they mostly won't create pages 
from scratch.) I want the students to be able to work using a screen 
reader and the teachers to work in WYSIWYG.

There is no perfect tool, of course, and quirks and shortcomings are 
just part of what we will accept in the process of what we're doing.

My hope is that some people here may have some experience and insight 
into a best choice. I invite your response and I hope the discussion 
proves helpful. I need to make a choice this summer, and will be able 
to do some testing with summer school students.

1. For all that I am asking, Amaya sounds like a reasonable choice.

http://www.w3.org/TR/NOTE-amaya-970220.html

But Charles has reservations about it in terms of meeting ATAG, not 
the least of which are validity checking and a concern that it may 
not work well with screen readers.

http://www.w3.org/2002/03/amaya5-3-atag1

Still, it looks like Amaya's basic functionality and support of 
accessible design is not bad.

2. Charles has also suggested looking at Mozilla, which I shall do.

3. And I wonder also about Macromedia Dreamweaver with Homesite.

I'm not sure what to add to my questions at this point -- but I'd be 
happy to respond to yours. Thank you.


. . / tom mcCain


http://www.crittur.com
tom@crittur.com
indianapolis, indiana usa

Received on Wednesday, 26 June 2002 08:23:15 UTC