re: MS Office and Accessibility

Well, except for the fact that you would apparently need to train anyone
using assistive technologies to download the documents in another
application, becuase the assistive technology hooks are not available when
the application is used inside a browser, you are unlikely to find an
accessibility argument to support your case.

You could point out that the bandwidth hit is higher, that the requirements
of accountability mean someone will have to keep on owning these kinds of
systems, that they are committing themselves to buying more of the same
forever instead of using an open format that would allow migration to free
software (and still be readable and editable using their current systems) or
whatever. I don't think any of those are accessibility issues.

I would like a strong accessibility argument for a long holiday on the beach,
if anyone can provide it. But I suspect that may be even less likely to
appear. (If you do have one, please send it off-list <grin/>)

Sorry, but I don't see how this list can help.

Charles

On Mon, 22 Oct 2001, Scarlett Julian (ED) wrote:

  The users for this portion of the site are schools that all have a common
  desktop installation (MS Office 97, NT4, IE5+) and hence the specificity of
  my question. Ideally I would get all infomation presented in html but to do
  this I have to get the info owners in our organisation to agree. They are
  under the illusion that because their client group all have Office that it
  is ok to serve up Office files rather than html pages. I need a solid
  argument why they can't do this .

Received on Monday, 22 October 2001 11:37:53 UTC