- From: Charles (Chuck) Oppermann <chuckop@MICROSOFT.com>
- Date: Fri, 15 Jan 1999 15:02:15 -0800
- To: Jon Gunderson <jongund@staff.uiuc.edu>, w3c-wai-ua@w3.org
<< Would you or other people at Microsoft be interested in helping with these workshops? >> Jon, for the past 3 years Microsoft has been helping access vendors get information about the HTML document. We call it Active Accessibility and it provides a generic interface to the DOM - long before it was called DOM too <smile>. There is a MSAA workshop at the Microsoft Professional Developers Conference every year and it's been documented in our newsletters and other developer resources. << Personally, I think that the fastest way to improve accessibility of the WWW for people with blindness is to help assistive technology developers understand interfaces like the DOM to provide alternative user interfaces to the information. Wilson Craig of Henter-Joyce is very excited about the possibility and we are trying to schedule workshops at ATIA events for assistive technology developers this summer and in the fall. >> Wilson Craig should already be very familiar with the DOM as implemented in Internet Explorer, since their product uses the Dynamic HTML object model extensively. We already produce reams of material on the DHTML object model and how to use it. I'm not exactly sure what you are asking of Microsoft in this case. -Chuck -----Original Message----- From: Jon Gunderson [mailto:jongund@staff.uiuc.edu] Sent: Thursday, January 14, 1999 2:52 PM To: Charles (Chuck) Oppermann; w3c-wai-ua@w3.org Subject: RE: UA ISSUE OF THE WEEK: Table element access In response to Charles Oppermann, I do not see anything wrong with user agents like IE or Navigator providing APIs for other (assistive) technoloiges. Personally, I think that the fastest way to improve accessibility of the WWW for people with blindness is to help assistive technology developers understand interfaces like the DOM to provide alternative user interfaces to the information. Wilson Craig of Henter-Joyce is very excited about the possibility and we are trying to schedule workshops at ATIA events for assistive technology developers this summer and in the fall. Would you or other people at Microsoft be interested in helping with these workshops? But I feel the guidelines should reflect what the user needs. Mainstrean browsers that do not provide a checkpoint feature natively could provide an interface to allow an assistive technology to provide the checkpoint and that would be an available response to a particular checkpoint available to a developer. Jon At 04:17 PM 1/13/99 -0800, Charles (Chuck) Oppermann wrote: ><< >There will also be "main stream" user agents that will be using non-visual >rendering of HTML information. Richard Premack attended one of the >telecons last month and was part of a company deeloping an auditory browser >for telephone and portable user agent technologies. He was interested in >how to make their product more accessible. >>> > >We can find problems under every rock we turn over. Let's solve the problem >that people have - which is access to the internet. > >Why do they have this problem? Because pages are badly written, the >authoring tools do not help, and the major browsers - Netscape and IE, still >have accessibility problems. > >No one is complaining about the accessibility of an aural browser. > >pwWebSpeak is a very good attempt at *fixing* the problem - it's not part of >the problem itself. > ><< >You are probably specifically concerned about Internet Explorer. In the >case enlargement, speech or Braille renderings IE could say it does not >apply or preferably that they provide an interface for other technologies >to provide these features. >>> > >Absolutely I'm concerned about IE, but I feel I can be objective and say >that IE and Netscape represent the biggest problems that users have. > >As far as providing an interface for other technologies - what's wrong with >that? That's a perfectly acceptable piece of the solution puzzle. In some >cases, such as keyboard access, the access should be built in. > >I feel very strongly that the UA group needs to define *and* limit the scope >of the first release of the guidelines to IE and Netscape. I think there is >no shame in being specific. They are the ones that have caused part of the >problem that users have and should be responsible for fixing their part of >it. > >Include all the other browsers in future revisions. CSS expanded it scope >to different types of media types it's second revision - why can't these >guidelines? > Jon Gunderson, Ph.D., ATP Coordinator of Assistive Communication and Information Technology Division of Rehabilitation - Education Services University of Illinois at Urbana/Champaign 1207 S. Oak Street Champaign, IL 61820 Voice: 217-244-5870 Fax: 217-333-0248 E-mail: jongund@uiuc.edu WWW: http://www.staff.uiuc.edu/~jongund http://www.als.uiuc.edu/InfoTechAccess
Received on Friday, 15 January 1999 18:02:24 UTC