Re: Accessibility of Amaya browser/editor

At 07:24 PM 10/17/1999 , Victor Tsaran wrote:
>Yesterday, while in search of an accessible WWW composing tool,
>I came across Amaya from the www.w3.org. Wow, I thought to my
>self, this must be the most accessible and HTML4.0-valid
>browser/editor. I downloaded the executable for Win95 and began
>testing. My surprise was, however, that while Amaya was
>HTML-correct, it wasn't that accessible at all.

Hi, Victor, Charles McCathieNevile has been fighting a (so far,
winning) battle to improve the accessibility of this authoring
tool for a while now.  Part of the problem is that so far, 
accessibility of authoring tools has still been an uncharted
territory -- and thus the work of the Authoring Tools working
group to correct these problems.  The spec from Authoring
Tools still has not been "finalized", but the Amaya team has
made some progress toward conformance anyway; once the Authoring
Tools document makes it through the recommendation process, I
expect that Amaya would soon have full compliance (right,
Charles?) as quickly as they are able to do it.  (Programming,
believe it or not, actually does take some time.)

You may want to read up on the Authoring Tools working group
and review the latest draft -- which can be found at:

      http://www.w3.org/TR/WAI-AUTOOLS/

(There is a group working draft available too, which is more
current, but which is not a "public draft" per se.  You can
find it at the Authoring Tools homepage.)

I will forward your comments to the authoring tools group (if
someone hasn't already beaten me to the punch) to make sure
your viewpoints are represented in the ongoing discussion
there.

-- 
Kynn Bartlett                                    mailto:kynn@hwg.org
President, HTML Writers Guild                    http://www.hwg.org/
AWARE Center Director                          http://aware.hwg.org/

Received on Monday, 18 October 1999 00:52:30 UTC