Accessable Chat

I am looking for opinions and experiences on accessible chat rooms.

  

I am in the market to purchase a chat program that could be used as an added feature on mostly health care related websites.

Is there an accessible chat program that is currently on the market?  Has anyone used accessible chat programs with a great ease of use?

 

What would be your stance on a website that had a chat room that wasn't accessible to all users?  Do you just not have chat?  Or would you tolerate it?

 

Thank you for your thoughts,

Christian

 

Christian Seus 

Technology Specialist

Division of Policy and Program Affairs

Institute for Child Health Policy

5700 SW 34th Street, Suite 323

Gainesville, FL 32608

Toll-Free (888) 433-1851

Phone: (352) 392-5904 x.275

Fax: (352) 392-8822

E-mail: cas@ichp.edu 

Web: <www.ichp.edu>

 

-----Original Message-----
From: Charles McCathieNevile [mailto:charles@w3.org] 
Sent: Wednesday, March 06, 2002 10:10 AM
To: Access Systems
Cc: WAI (E-mail)
Subject: RE: GW Micro Helps Make Macromedia Flash Content Accessible to People Who Are Blind

 

On Wed, 6 Mar 2002, Access Systems wrote:

  On Wed, 6 Mar 2002, Charles McCathieNevile wrote:

  > ASCII text is not a solution that works. "ASCII art" - using text characters
  > and layout to represent graphic content - is an extremely poor choice for
  > making graphics that can be presented to users of braille, or people using

  wasn't suggesting that it be used for graphics, your right almost no way a
  person using a braille or text to speech reader could understand it.

  that is where the alt tag is handy

OK, so it seems we are in agreement on that bit.
Bob also said
  I was pretty sure there was a text set for most languages, I have seen the
  Japanese version
[snip]
  there is no one single method that everyone can use, but there is a single
  language that every computer can use and that is ASCII.

CMN
OK, I think we are getting closer. ASCII is a way of encoding a particular
set of characters - those used in American English. (Actually not all
computers can use it - IBM computers used a different system for a long
time...) There are equivalent systems for other kinds of characters - and
Unicode (also called ISO-10646, or some other names) is the one most commonly
recommended because it includes almost all characters used today, some no
longer used, and some for only strange usages like the "klingon language"
invented by fans of star trek. (In 64000 characters I guess the first few
people to add their own silly ideas get to have a bit of space. I would
have preferred Mayan, but there are probably more  speakers of Klingon!).

CHeers

Chaals