re: NVU, child of Mozilla Composer (Windows & Linux)

Steven/Geoff,

> That is what Macromedia Contribute does.  Unfortunately, they dont allow
> you to forcibly make the content accessible.  After making a piece of
> content available to be edited via Contribute, they can apply styles
with
> the bold button, they can use font instead of Hx tags, etc.  If you find
> an answer Geoff please let me know for I am in the same boat here.

Actually, you do have *some* control here: you can restrict the styles
that may be applied and prevent the use of font, bold, underline and
italic tags altogether. However, the really big issue is getting people to
understand the concepts of semantic rather than presentational markup.
This is partly a matter of training and support, as well as intelligent
use of templates (see parenthesised sentence below). I don't think
accessibility can ever be entirely rule-driven, even by a very
sophisticated structured editor.

As a tech author, I have been wrestling with similar problems in getting
written documents styled / structured properly since well before HTML was
a feasible publishing format for "ordinary" people. (E.g. About 99% of
Word users still write everything in Normal style and apply formatting
manually IME. But one client I have is very good about training and has a
corporate culture of conforming to standards - and their documents are
properly styled and structured.)

Most people just don't care about semantics in the written word,
unfortunately: it is however a lot more visible and problematic in the
sphere of web accessibility.

Kind regards,

Lois Wakeman

--------------------------------
http://lois.co.uk
http://siteusability.com
http://communicationarts.co.uk

Received on Wednesday, 23 June 2004 05:23:54 UTC