Re: Jakob Nielsen's PDF format report

Hi,

if you have questions or suggestions about how WAI funds are spent they are
not very useful on this list. I suggest that you write a proposal to the
Director of WAI, who makes the decisions, although if you happen to be
represented as a W3C member (e.g. through the HTML writers' Guild) you could
also ask your advisory committee representative to follow up the question.

Just to put things in perspective, WAI has a full-time staff of 3, with
additional part-time contribution at staff level from another 3 people. There
are two positions open (one is a replacement position, one is a new
position), and I don't think the budget is full of spare cash to spend.

In Australia, you could ask for an accommodation to be made for a
disability-related problem with using the Report, and if no satisfactory
solution was forthcoming, follow it up with a complaint to the Human Rights
and Equal Opportunities Commission. I believe the same sort of approach is
available in the US.

cheers

Charles

On Tue, 25 Dec 2001, Scott Luebking wrote:

  Hi,

  I might be wrong, but I heard that one of the reasons that the Jakob
  Nielsen report was in PDF was because it has some feature which
  can lock the file or limits its copying.  If I minderstood, then
  that's a different set of issues.

  Why can't WAI funds be used to make accessible some key relevant documents
  which are inaccessible?  Perhaps the question to ask is why was the
  research done by someone not working with WAI.  Why wasn't WAI
  supporting such research before someone else started doing it?

  Scott

  > the alternative is simple.  It would not have cost them much on the
  > scale of things if they didn't want to do it in house or could not do it
  > in house to turn it over to someone who could produce it in an widely
  > accessible form.  I do not think it is the job of the wai to undertak
  > paying for all the inaccessible documents out there to be made
  > accessible.  I'd have done it for him for comparitive peanuts if he'd
  > but asked.


-- 
Charles McCathieNevile    http://www.w3.org/People/Charles  phone: +61 409 134 136
W3C Web Accessibility Initiative     http://www.w3.org/WAI    fax: +1 617 258 5999
Location: 21 Mitchell street FOOTSCRAY Vic 3011, Australia
(or W3C INRIA, Route des Lucioles, BP 93, 06902 Sophia Antipolis Cedex, France)

Received on Wednesday, 26 December 2001 21:20:55 UTC