Times New Roman"O wad some Power the giftie gie us To see oursels as ithers see us! " Robert Burns, "To A Louse/On Seeing One on a Lady's Bonnet at Church" For me, the most useful tool for making an accessible web page would be a presentation that showed the "normal" page and the accessible alternatives at the same time, with a way to edit the accessible content on the same display. For example, - showing editible ALT text next to each image - for LONGDESC, displaying the pointed-to content in an editable form - for image maps, showing the ALT for each AREA, again in editable form - for videos, seeing the captions, while being able to freeze and edit them - for applets or objects, seeing an editable alternative simultaneosly in another window - for frames, seeing an editable no frames version simultaneously in another window And, more ambitiously, - For a whole page, seeing, or better yet, hearing the text version as it might sound on a screenreader. E.g., something like lynx, or the text display you get with pwWebSpeak. Also, there should be a way to see which point in one presentation corresponds to a point in another. For example, when you highlight content in one presentation, it gets highlighted in the other. - for portions of a page labeled by a CLASS, the name of that class: plus a way to change that class name consistently thoughout all pages. (This assumes that in the future the CLASS name will be accessible text, so it must be something mnemonic and descriptive (cf. http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/w3c-wai-er-ig/1999Sep/0054.html and other email in that thread). This is useful because: - It better suits at least some people's thought processes to design the "normal" version first and add the accessible content later. This way you can devote full attention to the alternative content. - In fact, in some commercial settings, different people compose images and text, and it would be the best for the people most skilled in text to supply the alternative content. - It's a quick way for the author check of what was done. This is somewhat implied by 3.1, to prompt the user for accessibility information. However, "prompt" implies a box that pops up when inserting the image or other content, which is different than what I'm suggesting here. It's also suggested by checkpoints in Guideline 4, to provide methods for checking and correcting accessible content. However, this section starts off by talking about "alerts" and "highlighting problems" which implies the sorts of problems that can be spotted automatically. The presentation I'm suggesting address problems that wouldn't generate automatic alerts, since they depend on human judgment (e.g. checking that ALT the alternative content is meaningful and helpful). Also Appendix section 3.5 on "ALT text for the IMG element" offers a version of the document with ALT text instead of the image, but not alongside the image. So I'd suggest adding the editable presentations suggested above as an additional checkpoint under guideline 4. I'd personally give them priority 2. ------- Leonard R. Kasday, Ph.D. Institute on Disabilities/UAP, and Department of Electrical Engineering Temple University Ritter Hall Annex, Room 423, Philadelphia, PA 19122 kasday@acm.org (215) 204-2247 (voice) (800) 750-7428 (TTY)