- From: Bruce Bailey <bbailey@clark.net>
- Date: Mon, 24 Jul 2000 16:16:19 -0400
- To: A.Flavell@physics.gla.ac.uk, g.gay@utoronto.ca
- CC: WAI Guidelines List <w3c-wai-gl@w3.org>
Dear Alan, I confess that the situation you describe is not all that unusual. Perhaps Greg Gay can use that. I do want to return to the subject of the original post: Q) Can RTF documents be regarded as accessible? A) In a word, no. -- Thanks, Bruce Bailey "Alan J. Flavell" wrote: > On Fri, 21 Jul 2000, Bruce Bailey wrote: > > > It is probably just as easy to teach people to produce > > well-formatted HTML as it is to get them to use Word styles in a > > powerful and appropriate fashion. So why not spend your time on > > the former than the latter? > > Well, in the situation in which I find myself, it's because the > authors consider Word to be in their skillset, and are (by and large) > open to having that skillset polished and extended; other authors > consider their authoring skillset to be Latex, and, again, are more or > less open to having _that_ skillset polished. But if asked to produce > a web page, they would typically use Netscape Composer, or an obsolete > version of Front Page, or an obsolete version of Word's own quasi-HTML > extruder, to produce a piece of DTP, and would have little interest in > learning more. > > > As you > > observe, getting them to understand the point -- and then to care, is the > > harder problem. > > > > Alan, do you agree with me that the "average" RTF document is NOT > > accessible? > > I think you already know the answer to that. But I would answer it > more generally: the "average" document _of_any_kind_ is not > accessible, for the reason that you just agreed with me about: authors > do not take accessibility on board as part of their authoring process > (where it could be incorporated at little cost), and afterwards they > assess the potential costs of retro-fitting accessibility as being > unreasonably high, so (unless compelled by law or policy to do so) > they don't even attempt it. Sadly. > > best regards
Received on Monday, 24 July 2000 16:16:46 UTC