Re: ACollab Work Groups 1.1 Content accessible?

> is converted to accessible html on the fly?  If web desingers didnt have
> to adapt the uploaded files for accessibility, their acceptance of an
> accessible web would be more open.

But the real problem here is that it is the authors of the orignal 
documents that consider themselves designers!  The original design
philosophy of HTML was that HTML be so simple that anyone could
easily learn how to mark it up properly; i.e. it was designed to
be (broad sense) accessible to both readers and writers.

No automated tool is going to be as good as getting the content providers
to provide unstyled HTML directly.  Certainly no automated tool can
produce an accessible document out of an arbitrary inaccessible one.
You can produce valid HTML from MSWord, but the MSWord needs to have
been written to be accessible for it to be easy to produce accessible
HTML (or good tagged PDF) from it.  In default, the best you can do is to
provide the tool with a reverse style sheet, which may have to be done
for each author.

(Note that MSWord can violate the broad definition of accessiblity - 
require particular software and particular hardware capabilities - even
though it is written to be narrow definition accessible, but being narrow
definition accessible is necessary for automatic conversion to a more
universal format.)

Received on Tuesday, 15 June 2004 02:44:02 UTC