- From: Charles McCathieNevile <charles@sidar.org>
- Date: Wed, 22 Jan 2003 10:23:13 +1100
- To: Matthew Smith <matt@kbc.net.au>
- Cc: WAI Interest Group <w3c-wai-ig@w3.org>
The W3C's Authoring Tool Accessibility Guidelines - http://www.w3.org/TR/ATAG10 - are applicable to these kind of tools, and you should tell your vendor that since you are buying a product it should be fit for the purpose as sold (unfortunately Microsoft managed to convince the world to buy software on the specific understanding that it not necessarily fit for anything, and the trend has stuck - otherwise you would perhaps be able to get a refund under standard implied warranty provisions). There are products that can help - HTML tidy, as Matthew said, can be used in a workflow process to pick up errors, and you could add other tools like a-prompt or home-grown scripts to get the problems fixed. In the commercial world tools like AccRepair are able to check MS Office documents as well as HTML, and they have an interface that allows you to add the check/repair functionality for any specific needs. I believe there is a similar possibility with UsableNet's LIFT tools, but haven't seen it documented (HiSoftware went out of their way to show me how their stuff works, so I know). Of course it depends on the specifics of your situation... Finally some products allow you to customise the way they produce content. Many (i.e. 5 or 6) years ago I worked with HTML transit and Word documents for a client - the process of getting well-structured HTML instead of tag soup turned out to involve a few Word macros which had to be batch-run, followed by some tweaking of the HTML transit rules. But retro-fitting tens of thousands of pages turned out to be fairly fast and cheap. (The problem was training people to do the right thing in the first place, rather than forever afterwards doing things the hard way and then following it by applying the retro-fitting solution) cheers Chaals On Wednesday, Jan 22, 2003, at 09:26 Australia/Melbourne, Matthew Smith wrote: > > Hi Julian/All > >> we use Crystal Reports to present info on a web site linking to the >> rpt file >> and letting it generate the HTML. Problem is that the mark-up is >> shocking; >> we have several graphs in the reports and afaik there is no way to >> add an >> alt attribute to the image of the graph in the HTML page. Can anyone >> help >> please - pointers, advice etc would be so greatly appreciated. > > This is a common problem; try saving a Microsoft Office document as > HTML and you'll see what I mean... (Forgive me if I'm out of date - I > haven't worked with Microsoft software for a couple of years - last I > saw was Office 97.) > > Although the writers of what are specifically Web authoring tools (as > opposed to applications which are just able to write HTML) are > hopefully changing their products to produce good, accessible markup, > I don't forsee that many of the writers of other applications rushing > to do this unless they are already producing accessibility products. > -- Charles McCathieNevile charles@sidar.org Fundación SIDAR http://www.sidar.org
Received on Tuesday, 21 January 2003 18:23:41 UTC