Draft Authoring Tools Guidelines - Comments

At Judy Brewer's request, I've reviewed the working draft of the AT
Guidelines.  It is a very good start.

I do have a few suggestions/comments:

1. The proposed model suggests continuous monitoring for P1 access
requirements and author options for P2 and P3 access options. While I
agree with this approach personally, professionally and philosophically,
I'm concerned that web developers creating corporate, in-house, private,
intranet bound or other materials where accessibility considerations are
not applicable may find continuous monitoring instrusive and
disruptive.  For those new to web content development and most likely to
use WYSIWYG web authoring tools, the frequent prompting likely to be
generated by continuous monitoring would likely be confusing and
distracting as well.

What if users could choose the level of accessibility monitoring they
wished to employ, (none, some, all) during web page creation but, if the
none option was selected, during the first and subsequent page saves,
the authoring tool review the document for P1 omissions and suggested
corrections?

2. I found no mention of authoring tools checking for the existence of
closed captioning in digital video clips or reminding the user to
provide such.  There is a real need to provide an integrated, simple to
use and intuitive tool for adding closed caption text in the SAMI, SMIL
and Quicktime video formats.  I'm not certain that web authoring tools
would necessarily include this ability, but it is very much needed.

3. Perhaps I missed this one.  Was there a reference to suggesting that
the accessibility options be checked for if css2 formats are employed?

4. I'm afraid that assuring accessibility considerations will be taken
into account by applications which can convert or save documents in html
(i.e. Excel, Word, PageMaker) is going to be difficult.  Unfortunately,
many institutions do use their wordprocessors to publish web documents. 
Perhaps developers of these applications could be encouraged to include
optional checking for P1 access issues during conversion?

Here in the California community colleges, our Chancellor's Office has
recently established a policy that all web based resources, hardware or
software purchased with Chancellor's Office grant funding must be
accessible.  OCR here in California is of the opinion that all public
education web pages must be accessible.  It seems only reasonable that
our systems of public education here in California would be encouraged
to purchase web authoring tools from developers whose products support
accessible design.

Carl Brown, Director
High Tech Center Training Unit
of the California Community Colleges Chancellor's Office

Received on Sunday, 1 November 1998 12:30:49 UTC