RE: Accessable Chat

Well, IRC is outdated in the sense that Unix is outdated.

Its benefits are that it works pretty well, there are lots of compatible
systems and servers and clients, etc.

(It is one of the tools that W3C uses a lot internally, and we also use it to
support access to meetings for people who have difficulty with the telephone
- hearing or speaking difficulties, bad phone lines, need to be able to read
what was said two minutes ago again, ...)

I know of blind users who have experience with an IRC client in emacs, using
emacspeak, an mIRC, a windows client. There are lots of others for different
situtations, and there is a client built into Mozilla that uses images for
some things...

cheers

Charles McCN

On Mon, 11 Mar 2002, Christian Seus wrote:

  David,

  Thank you.  Have you used any of these systems.  IRC specifically? I have recently read that IRC is outdated, but the article that I read may be outdated itself.

  Christian


  -----Original Message-----
  From: David Poehlman [mailto:poehlman1@comcast.net]
  Sent: Friday, March 08, 2002 7:09 AM
  To: Charles McCathieNevile; Christian Seus
  Cc: WAI (E-mail)
  Subject: Re: Accessable Chat

  and some attempts have been aimed at making irc more pictorially
  available for these groups as well and the windows clients for irc have
  become fairly visually oriented but still remain at least to a great
  degree accessible to those not utillizing images.

  ----- Original Message -----
  From: "Charles McCathieNevile" <charles@w3.org>
  To: "Christian Seus" <cas@ichp.edu>
  Cc: "WAI (E-mail)" <w3c-wai-ig@w3.org>
  Sent: Friday, March 08, 2002 6:16 AM
  Subject: Re: Accessable Chat


  My very personal 2 cents worth:

  I would be extremely unhappy about a health-care related system that was
  inaccessible. If it were not possible to find an alternative I would, of
  course undertstand.

  Anyway, I think the most widely accessible chat system (except for
  people
  with significant intellectual disabilities, or difficulty typing and no
  voice
  input systems - both groups who are not well-served by most existing
  chat
  systems) is based on IRC - there are any number of clients, including
  some
  that work well with screen readers, some rudimentary attempts at
  producing
  them to work well for various other users, and it is available on
  virtually
  every software platform.

  Charles McCN

  On Thu, 7 Mar 2002, Christian Seus wrote:

    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



  --
  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)



-- 
Charles McCathieNevile    http://www.w3.org/People/Charles  phone: +61 409 134 136
W3C Web Accessibility Initiative     http://www.w3.org/WAI  fax: +33 4 92 38 78 22
Location: 21 Mitchell street FOOTSCRAY Vic 3011, Australia
(or W3C INRIA, Route des Lucioles, BP 93, 06902 Sophia Antipolis Cedex, France)

Received on Monday, 11 March 2002 13:05:00 UTC