RE: Macromedia not getting accessibility quite right...

Howdy. 

Thanks for the comment. I thought I would provide some insight here. 

The goal for Contribute was to make accessibility easy. 

The caveat is that the accessibility prompts must be turned on to work. Tom is right in saying that without the prompts, he will insert and image and nothing will happen. 

Once these are turned on, users will be asked for alt text when they insert an image. We do not expect people will be designing sites in Contribute, merely contributing content to the page (hence the name). So spacer images and images that require the use of the null or the empty alt attribute do not fit the profile of the Contribute user. Folks who design pages (in the Macromedia vision of the world) use Dreamweaver. Folks who simply update or create content, use Contribute. 

The term description was intended to provide a less technical way of understanding the term in the absence of training for those trying with less of a technical background. 

Thanks again for your comments. 

Cheers,
Bob

______________________________________
 
bob regan | macromedia | 608.238.6747

-----Original Message-----
From: Tom Gilder [mailto:w3c@tom.me.uk] 
Sent: Monday, November 11, 2002 2:22 PM
To: w3c-wai-ig@w3.org
Subject: Macromedia not getting accessibility quite right...


So then, Macromedia have today released their new "Contribute"
software, a low-cost Web page editor based on Dreamweaver MX, and a
trial for Windows is available at http://macromedia.com/contribute/.

However, a few things concern me about this software. In the product
info, MM claim that Contribute can produce fully valid XHTML and
enforce accessibility rules. So I downloaded the trial to try it out.

First of all, I just added a new image. I would have thought that at
very least it'd add alt="", but it didn't. Instantly invalid HTML.

So then I tried enabling the "enforce accessibility" option, which
made the software want a non-blank string for *every* image! In the
interface for changing image properties, it also says "Image
description (ALT)", which isn't that great a label.

Although Macromedia's interest in accessibility is a good thing, they
really need to implement it a bit better. I shall continue to play...

-- 
Tom Gilder
http://tom.me.uk/

Received on Monday, 11 November 2002 16:02:23 UTC