- From: Kynn Bartlett <kynn-hwg@idyllmtn.com>
- Date: Thu, 18 Nov 1999 20:11:47 -0800
- To: Claude Sweet <sweetent@home.com>
- Cc: WAI Interest Group Emailing List <w3c-wai-ig@w3.org>
At 06:51 PM 11/18/1999 , Claude Sweet wrote: >I respect you as a person, but I must disagree with your position. >Asking someone to learn something is fine, but placing an unfunded >MANDATE that everyone MUST learn html is entirely another matter. Of course it's unfair. That's why tools should support accessibility, and then we wouldn't have this problem -- someone could use Front Page or Mozilla Editor, and produce a working, accessible web page. >Education is constantly facing some politician passing a bill to have >schools perform a specific task, but fails to provide the necessary >resources to accomplish the mandate. >It is not fair to impose the task of learning to hand write html code >and become an experienced web designer. It would be great if funds are >provided to establish a school or district wide department with paid web >designers who will take the data from teachers to create an accessible >web site. Have you seen the "EMT"/"WAFT" idea? That's been proposed on Scott Leubking's excellent "ba-univ-tech-access" list for just such a case as this -- a university with trained web designers who can do the accessibility magic for professors and other staff who aren't skilled in HTML. >When html templates are commonly available that demonstrate how to >produce specific types of web pages, especially constructed to provide >examples that educators in various grades and disciplines can use - >then, and only then will you achieve your accessibility goals. So, let's work on that. :) Keep in mind that web accessibility (and web design itself!) is a very young field -- the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines _just_ came out this year! Developing templates is good and useful; we should consider identifying the needs of those educators for their pages and then providing some accessible examples. Would you like to work on this? -- Kynn Bartlett mailto:kynn@hwg.org President, HTML Writers Guild http://www.hwg.org/ AWARE Center Director http://aware.hwg.org/
Received on Thursday, 18 November 1999 23:17:02 UTC