Re: Authoring Tool Recommendations?

Kynn, I share your frustration.

I see the source of your frustration to be similar to mine. A huge
disconnect - academic accessibility vs. reality.

Here's an advertisement. IBM's Top Page 2000
(see http://www.shopper.com/prdct/989/892.html) has accessibility checking.
Top Page 2001 has better checking. Both facilitate accessible
authoring. The Top Page developers (in Tokyo) have worked closely with
the Home Page Reader team there to better understand the nature of
accessible web pages. I think that will be evident in TopPage 2001. By the
way, in Japan, TopPage is called Home Page Builder.

Jim Thatcher
IBM Special Needs Systems
www.ibm.com/sns
thatch@us.ibm.com
(512)838-0432


Kynn Bartlett <kynn@idyllmtn.com> on 09/16/99 07:09:51 PM

To:   w3c-wai-au@w3.org
cc:
Subject:  Authoring Tool Recommendations?




I just got off the phone with one of the Deans of Orange Coast
College (a southern california junior college) -- if you've been
following Cynthia Waddell's posts on IG, you know that California
community colleges are required to attain at least level single A
compliance with the WCAG.

The chap who called me said that his technical people advised
against using FrontPage 98 because it didn't produce accessible
web pages -- and he wants to know what does.

I didn't have an answer.  I still don't have an answer.  The HTML
authoring tool industry should be ashamed of the fact that I don't
have an answer.  But at least this group is working toward that
goal.

I know that we will complete our guidelines, and I know that we
will be able to evaluate existing tools against our standards, and
I know we'll have a "what's okay and what's bad and what's better"
answer soon -- "soon" being on the order of several months.

Right now, though, Orange Coast College needs an answer -- they
want to do the right thing, they just want to know what that is.
They want to know which software they should start training their
instructors to use.

Anyone got an answer that's more useful than mine?  I mumbled something
about FrontPage being not quite as bad as it used to be, and about
Dreamweaver apparently being decent -- but I don't use a web editor
myself (all coded by hand or via perl script) so I have no direct
experience.

Thoughts?

--
Kynn Bartlett  <kynn@idyllmtn.com>                   http://www.kynn.com/
Chief Technologist, Idyll Mountain Internet      http://www.idyllmtn.com/
Catch the Web Accessibility Meme!                   http://aware.hwg.org/

Received on Thursday, 16 September 1999 21:30:00 UTC