Re: demo

William, 

      Great site! Gave print outs of select pages to both our speech
teacher (who's been bugging me for software to help teach phonics) and the
reading coordinator who is in the market for a new reading program as the
current one "Success For All" does not live up to its name, at least not
for our kids.... Both said to tell you thank you.

	Haven't seen the demo yet - waiting for the login code that was promised
"moments" after being sent. Maybe I'll get it by morning... it's coming all
the way from Australia .... bytes have a hard swim backwards in time <grin>
...

	When I was teaching my LD & MR high schoolers, back when we moved from an
Apple IIe and a few old Radio Shack models and some TI99-4a's, to a lab of
386's, one of the advantages we gained was "Edit", in which the kids could
set the font, font size, font color and background color. After they tried
all the variations, most settled on a single combination they used all the
time. Of course, we had an incident. A boy chose to use a red font on black
background, and I couldn't read his screen. Instead of writing his English
assignment, he wrote a letter to a girl with some bad spelling and
"inappropriate language" that got stuck in the print que and came out when
the next class was in the lab ... The girl refused to speak to him again,
since the story spread around the building by lunch time, even tho the
teacher who found it destroyed it. But it was probably the most writing he
ever produced in one class period! ... 

	Setting the colors to what suited either their needs or their mood helped
the kids stay on task longer ... 

	I think it's safe to assume that much of setting color may be personal
preference, but at some point it gets to a need situation ... I've seen two
sites that let you set the colors for the whole site, one the AFB site, the
other a train site. The AFB site had color choices based on needs, the
train site had choices based on mood/gender, etc... 

	If the user is making a choice based on need, it should be able to
override anything the author puts on a page ... if the user is making a
choice based on something other than need, they may want to view the page
as it is then be able to hit a button to change it to suit ... 

	I think this control, to over-ride in all cases, and to display then allow
over-ride "on the fly", should be in the browser ... It should be a button,
or at least a choice from a "tools" button or command ...not buried a
hundred lines down in the "options" ...

				Anne

	

	

At 07:12 AM 3/8/01 -0800, William Loughborough wrote:
>http://www.elr.com.au/ has a demonstration set that contains many of the 
>things we've been discussing, in particular the ability to trivially change 
>background colors and slide show icons. I'm not asserting accessibility 
>here but just pointing out that they have several features readily 
>available that should be useful in certain situations.
>
>I am curious if those (you know who you are <g>) in the teaching racket 
>think this is significant stuff?
>
>
>--
>Love.
>                 ACCESSIBILITY IS RIGHT - NOT PRIVILEGE
>
>
Anne Pemberton
apembert@erols.com

http://www.erols.com/stevepem
http://www.geocities.com/apembert45

Received on Thursday, 8 March 2001 17:43:24 UTC