- From: Jonathan Chetwynd <j.chetwynd@btinternet.com>
- Date: Wed, 14 Jan 2004 07:43:48 +0000
- To: Wendy A Chisholm <wendy@w3.org>
- Cc: w3c-wai-gl@w3.org
Wendy, well spotted: http://www.widgit.com/products/webwise/browser.htm is the product, as you will recognise this meets some of the needs I have been advocating at WAI for about 6 years. This is an exciting development for a proprietary product. Unfortunately it does little for authors or authoring tools, it would be great if WCAG could take some of this on board. Because this is not an open source or royalty free product there are significant issues regarding authoring. Users have rather restricted possibilities, for instance it will be interesting to see how it works with this companies own web authoring product which creates pages as one large image, though more recent publications save a whole line of text and symbols, or change the name of the symbol all this is to protect their copyright on individual symbols. example pages: whole page http://www.moorcroft.hillingdon.sch.uk/recipes.htm#Turkey single lines http://www.widgit.com/rainforest/html/topic_3/topic3-1.htm pc only scripting issue raised with widgit renamed graphics http://www.symbolworld.org/learning/science-nature/birds/ birds1.htm There are significant advantages to using royalty free images, unfortunately they are also expensive to create, and royalties provide a steady source of income. It would certainly be encouraging to see work start on a w3c or other open source graphical browser and royalty free svg symbol graphics set. Navigation across the web, as well as within a site, plain english summaries and much more all continue to need addressing. thanks Jonathan On Monday, January 12, 2004, at 05:26 am, Wendy A Chisholm wrote: > > Story at: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/3379547.stm > > "The system, called Communicate Webwise, automatically turns > information on pages into symbols or plain text. > > The developer, Widgit Software, says it can process most web pages, > except those containing complicated java or flash components. " > > More about Webwise from the Widgit Software site: > http://www.widgit.com/products/webwise/browser.htm > > I will contact them for more information. > --w > > -- > wendy a chisholm > world wide web consortium > web accessibility initiative > http://www.w3.org/WAI/ > /-- > Jonathan Chetwynd http://www.peepo.co.uk "It's easy to use"
Received on Wednesday, 14 January 2004 02:40:00 UTC