Re: Web Accessibility Visualization Tool updated

Jon, I don't think this answers Brian's underlying question.

If your students are doing something for the sake of the exercise, and are  
going to throw it away afterwards, I don't see the point in helping them  
beyond my general practice of answering well-expressed questions when I  
can. I have had plenty of students of my own working in this area, and I  
have expected them to learn by directly involving themselves in the  
community. (The good ones did. The others floundered. But unpaid  
supervision in learning projects is a tough school). Plenty of others also  
have students, or people trying to solve questions of an extermely  
practical nature, with an extremely tangible outcome.

If they are developing something the University or they plan to sell as a  
proprietary product without available source, I dn't see the point in  
helping either. Sidar has been developing a similar tool for a couple of  
years. It is multilingual, provides a wide range of tests and can generate  
reports for its automatic tests as well as guide the user through the  
manual testing of the visualisations, and we use it both as a testbed for  
new technology and as a production tool for accessibility evaluation. If  
your students' tool was as good as Hera already, and we were interested in  
swapping over to it, then there would be value in improving it.

On the other hand if this will remain open source, and thus freely  
available for the entire community to extend, there is value in helping,  
because we can be certain that at least the codebase can be maintained and  
improved.

So to put the question again: What is the license under which this tool  
and its code is available, and are there any plans for its future?

cheers

Chaals

On Thu, 31 Mar 2005 05:36:13 +1000, Jon Gunderson <jongund@uiuc.edu> wrote:

> Right now it is just a student project, if you want help the
> students thats great, if not then ignore the request.

> ---- Original message ----
>> Date: Wed, 30 Mar 2005 20:50:41 +0200
>> From: Brian Kelly <webfocus@gmail.com>
>>
>> Hi Jon
>>   The last time I spend time and effort in checking one of
> your tools
>> (the Illinois Accessible Web Publishing Wizard for Microsoft
> Office) I
>> was very disappointed when the final version came out that it
> was a
>> licensed product.  I had assumed that the software would be
> freely
>> available, and ideally open source.  I feel that you (your
>> organisation, not you personnally) got my effort under false
>> pretences.
>>   SO, to avoid possible confusion  this time, can you
> clarify the
>> licesing position for this software.

-- 
Charles McCathieNevile                      Fundacion Sidar
charles@sidar.org   +61 409 134 136    http://www.sidar.org

Received on Thursday, 31 March 2005 01:42:33 UTC