Re: ACollab Work Groups 1.1 Content accessible?

> be more likely to be sharing MSword docs, text files, or some other 
> non-web format.

Whilst I wouldn't expect a tool like this to support all web formats,
MSWord and PDF are actually first class web formats in that they
allow cross site hyperlinks.  PDF, and to a lesser extent, MSWord are
also de facto web formats in that they provide significant content
on "web" sites (in fact PDF tends to provide most of the real content!)

> Forcing authors to make their content accessible, though perhaps 
> desirable, is not practical from a business perspective. If they don't 
> like being forced, they will use someone else product that does not 
> force accessibility upon them. There has to be legislation to enforce 

I totally agree.  This reminds me of the statistics programming 
adviser at university who said that users preferred the statistics
package that suppressed the loss of significance error messages that
resulted from trying to fit more parameters to a model than the model
would support; they would rather produce garbage than be told that they
were producing it.

> this type of requirement. You're better off making the accessibility 
> tools available, and informing your users, than forcing them to abide 
> (in most cases).

The other problem, of course, is that tools cannot make subjective 
judgements, so will produce both false positives and false negatives,
which some of the users using them explicitly could be taught to
understand, but not people being forced to use it.

Received on Tuesday, 15 June 2004 02:44:11 UTC