- From: Matt May <mcmay@bestkungfu.com>
- Date: Mon, 12 Mar 2001 18:14:47 -0800 (PST)
- To: Anne Pemberton <apembert@erols.com>
- Cc: William Loughborough <love26@gorge.net>, Kynn Bartlett <kynn-edapta@idyllmtn.com>, w3c-wai-gl@w3.org
> The fact that some members of the committee have their noses out of joint > with Microsoft doesn't change the fact that many web authors, especially > those who aren't high on the html hierarchy, use Word ... And Word produces inaccessible HTML a good portion of the time... but that's not my point. My point is that it's antithetical to an organization that produces public specifications and pushes open-source tools to require the use of a commercial, closed-source product to meet its specs. > The guidelines need to be neutral on tools ... any computer-generated > readabilty level based on syllables and words per sentence would work just > as well .... And it still wouldn't help more than it would harm. At best, a requirement like this gets largely ignored. At worst, the entire document does. > The fact that it is "easy" to order that everything that isn't text be > made text, isn't reason enough to kick out checkpoints that bring real > accessibility to disabled human beings trying to use the web. I fail to see how requiring untrained content producers to mangle their copy until it hits some magic number in a black-box tool like Word does anything at all to assist in accessibility. You're trying to eliminate a problem after it's been created. The way to solve this is to get content producers to learn how to write accessible content _before_ they go out and do it, and that's where my recommendation of a required reading section would actually do some good. It has to be at the front of the process. Authoring or ER tools will not do. - m
Received on Monday, 12 March 2001 21:16:55 UTC