Re: What are we doing about Problem #1?

At 11:55 1998/06/25 -0700, William Longborough wrote:
>In Jan's paper at http://www.utoronto.ca/atrc/rd/hm/3tions.htm is a
>'summary statement': "...it seems clear that published guidelines and
>pleas for cooperation have been ineffective in increasing the actual use
>of accessible HTML authoring practices on the Web. In order to change
>this state of affairs, the accessible HTML community must win the
>cooperation of the most popular Web authoring product makers..."
>
>WL:: Shouldn't this be our highest priority, instead of yet another set
>of improved guidelines?  Anybody got any ideas of how to improve our
>results in this area?
>--
Yes, authoring product makers are important to us, both for the functionality
they provide, and making it both easy to use, hard to abuse.

I'm glad to hear that the next release of HoTMetaL will support HTML 4.0
and its accessibility features. How and when can that information be made 
public?

An idea that I discussed at CSUN was to get the attention of those 
legislators who have inaccessibled web sites, by providing an accessibility 
review of their home pages, with reminder that they are responsible to 
their whole constituency, and are excluding some. This may be illegal 
for government information, except that the U.S. house and senate members
are above the law. Instead, a more narrowly focused target would be the 
members of the rules committees first, as they determine required policy 
for the legislators, and could be more effective that way. Increasing the
awareness of legislators may make them more responsive to better laws on 
information accessibility.

Regards/Harvey

Received on Friday, 26 June 1998 19:02:38 UTC