Re: Web Authoring Tools that are Both Accessible and Produce Accessible Content

Gerry, the Authoring Tool Aggessibility Guidelines Working Group has done
some preliminary reviews of tools, whch are available
http://www.w3.org/WAI/AU/reviews (And are interested in further reviews, if
people have time to read the relevant documents and test their tools against
them). In particular, there is a review of HotMetal.

The review of HotMetal states that it seems to use all system and
accessibility conventions, enabling it to work with assistive technologies.

Cheers

Charles McCN

On Mon, 8 May 2000, Gerald G. Weichbrodt wrote:

  Since there's been some discussion recently about Microsoft FrontPage and
  accessibility issues concerning the pages it produces, I thought I'd ask
  whether there are any reasonably powerful web authoring packages that are
  both accessible and produce accessible content as a matter of course.  I'm
  totally blind and am currently using FrontPage 98.  I find that I have to
  manually add images and their Alt content in the HTML view that FrontPage
  provides, but a lot of the other stuff is pretty keyboard-friendly.  Also, I
  like knowing that, if I get stuck in adding something in WYSIWYG mode or in
  seeing just exactly what I've done, I can easily hit Control+PageDown and
  have a look at the HTML source code.  This goes a good way towards making
  FrontPage a decent package for a blind person.
  
  I keep hearing about the great accessibility features of HotMetal, but I
  haven't heard whether its interface is accessible for a blind person at this
  time.  The last I heard it was much better at producing accessible pages
  than at giving an accessible experience to the web author.
  
  So, there we have packages that do the one task pretty well or the other
  task pretty well.  What can a person with disabilities use that both aids in
  ease of use and produces accessible content?
  
  Thanks,
  Jerry Weichbrodt
  

--
Charles McCathieNevile    mailto:charles@w3.org    phone: +61 (0) 409 134 136
W3C Web Accessibility Initiative                      http://www.w3.org/WAI
Location: I-cubed, 110 Victoria Street, Carlton VIC 3053
Postal: GPO Box 2476V, Melbourne 3001,  Australia

Received on Tuesday, 9 May 2000 12:31:48 UTC