My TextOnly Filter (text-equiv)

Hello everybody

  until now I was only reading your msgs without commenting, but reading
with strong interest... I am a student and working on a "smart" text-only
filter already implementing many of the ideas from
http://www.w3.org/WAI/ER/text-equiv.htm

  Attached is a sample input page (index.html) to my tool, and what comes
out of it; text-index.html. Please notice how the graphical bullets created
by FrontPage on index.html get translated into UL/LI and how all the IMG are
converted, depending on size, ALT, link etc. Attached is my project report
incl. src as PDF for details. Sorry for attaching the PDF to this msg, I
know I should post it to my website and send you only the URL...

  If the WAI-ER group is interested in using this tool as a basis for the
planned toolkit, I am open for discussion. A modulare table-linearizer etc.
as Daniel (or Leonard?) mentioned would fit in very well, one only needs to
change the HTMLTable::newTextOnly() method... (see report)

  Below is some blurb (my opinion) about two questions that seemed to be in
discussion at some point: Separate/Alternative accesseible version of a
page, and Interactive vs. automated/batch transforms.

Talk to you tomorrow on the phone conference,
Michael

1) Separate/Alternative accessible version: I think realistically this is
the way the go, even though in theory it would be nicer to have just one
version, with different CSS etc. - but the web and webmasters are just not
at that point yet. -- I must admit that I don't really understand the
problem people seem to have with an alternative version: Provided that each
non-perfectly-accessible page contains <LINK title="Text-only version"
rel="alternate" href="text_only.html" media="aural, braille, tty"> to the
alternative accessible page, braille UAs and Lynx could just fetch that one
instead, transparently for the end-user!

2) Interactive vs. automated/batch transforms: I strongly defend fully
automated tools for TRANSFORMATION, maybe less so for Evaluation. "General
public webmasters" don't want to spend time looking at details, but they
might be willing to provide an accessible site if it can be done
automatically by a tool, with a simple click.

----
Michael Vorburger <mike@vorburger.ch> & <michael.vorburger@epfl.ch>
WEBMASTERS, check out my personal Web Style Guide at:
http://www.vorburger.ch/kissfp/styleguide