Re: Published work on Accessibility available

On Wed, 27 Mar 2002, Dana Louise Simberkoff wrote:

> HiSoftware has recently published a book  "Understanding Accessibility"
> (ISBN - 1-930616-03-1). This book, is a guide to creating and testing Web
> sites that are developed to the U.S. federal standards for accessible Web
> content, and the World Wide Web, or W3C, accessibility
> guidelines. 
[...]
> 
> For a limited time, we would like to make the first edition eBook available,
> at no cost, to members of this list.

Well, it was a nice offer ... but I think it really is only for
Microsoft platforms.  I'm running on a RH 6.2 linux platform.
Just for the record (and possibly to save others some trouble)
here's what happened.

I was able to fill in the form OK (though it wuld have helped if
there were a clear indication of which fields were required), and
duly got my email with URL and decryption password.  I
successfully downloaded the .zip archive from the given URL.  My
installed version of unzip (UnZip 5.40 of 28 November 1998, by
Info-ZIP) was not able to decrypt the files; but I got an updated
binary (5.42) which could manage it.  This left me with an
(Microsoft?) eBook format and a pdf format.  I'm not aware of any
compatible Microsoft eBook reader for linux (but I'd welcome
suggestions!).  I tried opening the .pdf with acrobat reader (4.0
- the most recent available for linux from Adobe), with
xpdf/pdftotext and with Ghostview/Ghostscript.  All failed in a
diversity of unencouraging ways.  It's conceivable that newer
versions of xpdf or ghostscript might be able to read it - but I
have run out of time and energy...

Which all adds up to what has already been mentioned here: it
would be really nice if it were available in an properly open,
inter-operable format (such as HTML).  I presume the reason for
not doing this is because of the lack of sufficiently
satisfactory "copy protection" control; but even using an earlier
PDF version that is compatible with Adobe's cross-platform
readers (PDF 1.3?) might do the trick.

In the meantime, I still welcome the publication, and the free
offer; and look forward to maybe being able to read it at some
time in the future...

Regards,

- Barry.

--

Received on Tuesday, 2 April 2002 06:54:37 UTC