Article for Magazine/Press

I think two different articles/papers need to be written.

One for broad educated/technical audience, i.e. readers that do not
all know about the architecture of the Web: browser/server, HTML,
HTTP, but are able to understand how it works from 50000 feet and then
understand what accessibility is about, with some concrete examples.
Basically the message here is: it's possible to access to the
Internet/Web without sight, providing the author provides such and
such information (descriptive text for image, title for frame, good
structure, etc).

The second for web page authors, i.e. people that know about HTML/HTTP
in some details, but only have a vague idea of what accessibility is
about (they heard about ALT maybe). There we need to stress the
curb-cut effect (it's good for web phone, mobile, and their own
maintenance of pages) and explain the "how" in some details: what
needs to be done in the markup (ALT, TITLE on Frame, use CSS, etc)

In both case, I envision a 2 full pages article, with a screen dump of
some nice web site and what it gives in text-only mode (good and bad
cases).  This graphics/text-only piece can be shared in both articles,
it's mostly the level of explanation details around it that changes in
the two articles. I also think that in both cases, we should put the
emphasis on visual problem, and just mention other disabilities with
less details.

There are several sub-deliverables under this item:

 - identify/prioritize which magazines/press (online or printed) to
 target in the broad technical audience case: e.g. Scientific
 American, USA Today Tech News, NewsWeek, Time (maybe an even smaller
 version for biggies like Times: one page or less), and more academic
 technical press (ACM, etc).

 - identify which magazines/press (online or printed) to target in the
 web publishing case: since everything is about the web now, almost
 every publication is a candidate, so we need to prioritive well,
 depending on readership figures I would guess: PCWeek, ComputerWeek,
 Windows, etc.

 - agree within EO on a Table of Content for both articles, with rough
 content for review.

 - handle the graphics/text-only example piece as a shared item.

 - identify/contact magazine/press editors for each target and
 maintain an ongoing contact database for the future (since this is
 not going to happen overnight, e.g we might get a slot in 6 months,
 or before, or after, we need to keep track of opportunities,
 contraints in terms word count, format, dead-line for each target)

 - identify technical writers to handle the final versions and their
 variation depending on individual publication constraints.

 - do the same work of identification + contact + handle translation
 for Europe/Asia.


I have an action item for posting a TOC and rough content for both
articles and I guess I will also deal with the
graphic/text-only-result scenario while doing that (unless this is
also part of another deliverable to do such an good/bad design example).

We need to start the identification part in parallel asap, so that we
get some feedback on time/format contraints.

Received on Thursday, 6 August 1998 08:38:30 UTC