Re: Betsie and other text only conversion applications

At 01:41 PM 1/25/2001 , Jamie Mackay wrote:
>Just wondering on what people on this forum think about applications like
>Betsie which convert webpage content to text only on the fly.

In general it's not a bad idea.

>It seems to work as far as I can tell and is a solution to the problem of
>people not updating their text only pages - the code is very ugly, but is
>presumeably fine for a screen reader?

It does solve the problem; the best general solution, however, is to
have either:

(a) Gracefully degrading web pages [an approach which has some
     limitations], or
(b) Server-generated web pages [an approach which requires a bit more
     work and overhead]

Note also that text-only pages only meet the needs of one or two
very specific user groups and don't provide a path to general
usability and accessibility -- both of the techniques listed above
(a) and (b) do much better at meeting a broader range of needs.

>Is anyone aware of other applications that do this better?

Yes, but we haven't shipped yet. :)  Reef, with our purchase and
integration of Edapta's edaptive systems technology, should have
this capability in a future release.  When, I'm not sure, because
I'm not the guy in charge of product releases. :)

--Kynn

-- 
Kynn Bartlett  <kynn@idyllmtn.com>                http://kynn.com/
Technical Developer Relations, Reef           http://www.reef.com/
Chief Technologist, Idyll Mountain Internet   http://idyllmtn.com/
Contributor, Special Ed. Using XHTML     http://kynn.com/+seuxhtml
Unofficial Section 508 Checklist       http://kynn.com/+section508

Received on Thursday, 25 January 2001 17:12:26 UTC