RE: Published work on Accessibility available

Barry-

I wanted to respond to this question on the list, in case other list members
had questions about the availability of this publication in other formats.

As per the "Understanding Accessibility Request Response" any user can
request the HTML Format of the Offered book. This can be obtained by sending
an e-mail to publishing@hisoftware.com

Barry, I will send you the HTML version of the book off-list.

Regarding your question about required fields on the registration form, the
form states that Name and E-Mail Address are required to get the email with
download information.

Please let me know if I can be of further assistance. I hope that you will
find the book to be a helpful resource.

Best Regards,
Dana Louise Simberkoff
HiSoftware Company
603-229-3055





-----Original Message-----
From: Barry McMullin [mailto:mcmullin@eeng.dcu.ie]
Sent: Tuesday, April 02, 2002 6:55 AM
To: Dana Louise Simberkoff
Cc: w3c-wai-ig@w3.org
Subject: Re: Published work on Accessibility available


On Wed, 27 Mar 2002, Dana Louise Simberkoff wrote:

> HiSoftware has recently published a book  "Understanding Accessibility"
> (ISBN - 1-930616-03-1). This book, is a guide to creating and testing Web
> sites that are developed to the U.S. federal standards for accessible Web
> content, and the World Wide Web, or W3C, accessibility
> guidelines.
[...]
>
> For a limited time, we would like to make the first edition eBook
available,
> at no cost, to members of this list.

Well, it was a nice offer ... but I think it really is only for
Microsoft platforms.  I'm running on a RH 6.2 linux platform.
Just for the record (and possibly to save others some trouble)
here's what happened.

I was able to fill in the form OK (though it wuld have helped if
there were a clear indication of which fields were required), and
duly got my email with URL and decryption password.  I
successfully downloaded the .zip archive from the given URL.  My
installed version of unzip (UnZip 5.40 of 28 November 1998, by
Info-ZIP) was not able to decrypt the files; but I got an updated
binary (5.42) which could manage it.  This left me with an
(Microsoft?) eBook format and a pdf format.  I'm not aware of any
compatible Microsoft eBook reader for linux (but I'd welcome
suggestions!).  I tried opening the .pdf with acrobat reader (4.0
- the most recent available for linux from Adobe), with
xpdf/pdftotext and with Ghostview/Ghostscript.  All failed in a
diversity of unencouraging ways.  It's conceivable that newer
versions of xpdf or ghostscript might be able to read it - but I
have run out of time and energy...

Which all adds up to what has already been mentioned here: it
would be really nice if it were available in an properly open,
inter-operable format (such as HTML).  I presume the reason for
not doing this is because of the lack of sufficiently
satisfactory "copy protection" control; but even using an earlier
PDF version that is compatible with Adobe's cross-platform
readers (PDF 1.3?) might do the trick.

In the meantime, I still welcome the publication, and the free
offer; and look forward to maybe being able to read it at some
time in the future...

Regards,

- Barry.

--

Received on Tuesday, 2 April 2002 08:25:37 UTC