- From: William Loughborough <love26@gorge.net>
- Date: Fri, 06 Nov 1998 07:55:45 -0800
- To: "w3c-wai-au@w3.org" <w3c-wai-au@w3.org>
I am ashamed and embarrassed that during the AU conference call I
championed the position that we should restrict our efforts to the
product of authoring tools without addressing forcefully the
accessibility of the tools themselves. This is exactly the position of
"expedience" that we rightly deplore, e.g. PDF is so much more
convenient than HTML conversion, etc.
Despite a recent posting by Chuck Opperman: "I agree that it should be
dropped. There are plenty of excellent references on producing
accessible applications. Sun, IBM, Trace and Microsoft all have
guidelines for Universal Design and software applications." it is
incumbent on us to assure that any software that we play *any* part in
promulgating attend carefully to matters of accessibility; this includes
all our own internal tools or even the "Word macros" that constitute
authoring tools - because the next person who must use these tools for
maintenance will hopefully need to use access tools with said software.
Bottom line: this old geezer feels that Section 4 of our document is
central and vital to our output and that this is a line-in-the-sand,
do-or-die, deal-breaker, and all those other cliches and again I
apologize for forgetting why we're here.
--
Love.
ACCESSIBILITY IS RIGHT - NOT PRIVILEGE
http://dicomp.pair.com
Received on Friday, 6 November 1998 10:57:15 UTC