RE: Accessable Chat

FYI: Here at WebAIM a web based chat was developed for a few distance
education classes at Utah State University (USU), and I believe it will be
used next month for our On-line Web Accessibility Training Event.

http://acropolis.usu.edu/chat

It seems to work very well. The feedback we have received has been very
positive so far. In our situation we could not find a solution so we created
our own and hope to develope it further. This has been our approach to many
situations where accessibility is a must but accessible software does not
exist.

Jared Smith, the developer of the USU chat, also wrote an article on our
website about the accessibility of chat programs.

http://www.webaim.org/articles/chats


Shane Anderson
Programmer/Analyst
Web Accessibility In Mind (WebAIM)
Center for Persons with Disabilities
Utah State University
http://www.WebAIM.org

-----Original Message-----
From: w3c-wai-ig-request@w3.org [mailto:w3c-wai-ig-request@w3.org]On Behalf
Of Christian Seus
Sent: Thursday, March 07, 2002 11:38 AM
To: WAI (E-mail)
Subject: Accessable Chat


I am looking for opinions and experiences on accessible chat rooms.

I am in the market to purchase a chat program that could be used as an added
feature on mostly health care related websites.
Is there an accessible chat program that is currently on the market?  Has
anyone used accessible chat programs with a great ease of use?

What would be your stance on a website that had a chat room that wasn’t
accessible to all users?  Do you just not have chat?  Or would you tolerate
it?

Thank you for your thoughts,
Christian

Christian Seus
Technology Specialist
Division of Policy and Program Affairs
Institute for Child Health Policy
5700 SW 34th Street, Suite 323
Gainesville, FL 32608
Toll-Free (888) 433-1851
Phone: (352) 392-5904 x.275
Fax: (352) 392-8822
E-mail: cas@ichp.edu
Web: <www.ichp.edu>

-----Original Message-----
From: Charles McCathieNevile [mailto:charles@w3.org]
Sent: Wednesday, March 06, 2002 10:10 AM
To: Access Systems
Cc: WAI (E-mail)
Subject: RE: GW Micro Helps Make Macromedia Flash Content Accessible to
People Who Are Blind

On Wed, 6 Mar 2002, Access Systems wrote:

  On Wed, 6 Mar 2002, Charles McCathieNevile wrote:

  > ASCII text is not a solution that works. "ASCII art" - using text
characters
  > and layout to represent graphic content - is an extremely poor choice
for
  > making graphics that can be presented to users of braille, or people
using

  wasn't suggesting that it be used for graphics, your right almost no way a
  person using a braille or text to speech reader could understand it.

  that is where the alt tag is handy

OK, so it seems we are in agreement on that bit.
Bob also said
  I was pretty sure there was a text set for most languages, I have seen the
  Japanese version
[snip]
  there is no one single method that everyone can use, but there is a single
  language that every computer can use and that is ASCII.

CMN
OK, I think we are getting closer. ASCII is a way of encoding a particular
set of characters - those used in American English. (Actually not all
computers can use it - IBM computers used a different system for a long
time...) There are equivalent systems for other kinds of characters - and
Unicode (also called ISO-10646, or some other names) is the one most
commonly
recommended because it includes almost all characters used today, some no
longer used, and some for only strange usages like the "klingon language"
invented by fans of star trek. (In 64000 characters I guess the first few
people to add their own silly ideas get to have a bit of space. I would
have preferred Mayan, but there are probably more  speakers of Klingon!).

CHeers

Chaals

Received on Friday, 8 March 2002 19:49:51 UTC