RE: Online Marketing

On Mon 20 Jul, Wayne Myers-Education wrote:

[snip]

Hello Wayne,

> my name is Wayne Myers, i work for BBC Education Online in London as a 'Web
> Assistant', which means i do HTML, Perl and whatever else is going. i am
> currently working on a thing called the Betsie project, which is an attempt
> at resolving some of the quite serious accessibility problems associated
> with various parts of the BBC Online offering by pushing all pages through
> a CGI script that alters the page mark-up so as to improve their
> suitability for text-speech browsing.

As one of those who wrote to the BBC expressing my concern about these
problems, may I say how glad I am to hear something is being done, and wish
you every success with it.

> Betsie will shortly be entering the test phase, at which point i shall post
> the url to this list...

> i was just wondering if anyone knew of anything that already does what i'm
> hoping to get Betsie to do. i couldn't find anything similar, but that
> doesn't mean anything...

I found a PD Perl script called a 'Web Page Demoroniser' at:
<http://www.fourmilab.ch/>, which claims to 'correct moronic and gratuitously
incompatible HTML'. I have to admit that I haven't yet found the need to use
it but it may help to get you part way to where you want to be. It's in a
very small ZIP file, so I've taken the liberty of emailing it to you
separately. I hope it helps.

The other problem at the BBC websites is the lack of ALT texts on many of
your images. I'm afraid that these will require to be manually edited in, but
will greatly improve the site for those of us browsing with 'images off' for
whatever reason. Alan Flavell has a very good (and amusing) tutorial on the
subject of ALT texts, and I'd recommend a visit to his site:
<http://ppewww.ph.gla.ac.uk/~flavell/>.

Good luck!

All the best,

Iain

-- 

Iain Logan, Langholm, Dumfriesshire - Chartered Transport Consultant
<http://homepages.enterprise.net/iainlogan/>
<mailto:iainlogan@enterprise.net>

Received on Monday, 20 July 1998 17:02:41 UTC