- From: Wayne Dick <wed@csulb.edu>
- Date: Mon, 10 Jul 2006 11:32:36 -0700
- To: Shawn Henry <shawn@w3.org>,"EOWG (E-mail)" <w3c-wai-eo@w3.org>
Dear Group, I'm still working it out in my mind, on the output issue for authoring tools. My term is "universally perceivable text", or just "universal text" or "accessible text". To me text is the content of verbal communication. It can be spoken, signed or printed in many formats. It can be dynamic or real-time media or it can be static as in Braille or print for visual reading. Only certian forms of text can be recovered by programs with perfect accuracy. Accessible HTML is one form. To be universally percievable, text must be able to be converted to any presentation of that text by a machine with 100% accuracy. This means perfectly accurate rendering of text content and logical structure as well as textual alternatives of non-textual data where perfect translation is impossible. A bottom line for a authoring tools is to produce universally percievable text. Icing on the cake would be to add translator to widely used universally percievable text formats -- like HTML. I may sound a little obsessive on this, but we receive a lots of "e-text" for student's textbooks. Very little is accessible text. Even if we can get the context of text we rarely can reproduce the logical structure. So searching by headings is not possible. Also, my university system has thousands of professors acting independently producing text for students to read as part of their curriculum. Nothing is produced by authoring tools that encourage universally percievable text. The burden of transcription is on the student and the disabled student services. The work backlog for student services is impossible to complete. Disabled students often spend the first five weeks of 15 week semesters getting accessible text material that is necessary for academic success. Wayne Wayne Dick PhD Chair Computer Engineering and Computer Science, CSU, Long Beach Coordinator of Academic Technology Accessibility, CSU System
Received on Monday, 10 July 2006 18:32:43 UTC