Educational Workshops Related to UA Guideline Results

JRG in response to Charles Oppermann:

At 03:02 PM 1/15/99 -0800, Charles (Chuck) Oppermann wrote:
><<
>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.

JRG: I know that microsoft has a tremendous amount of information avaialble
on using the DOM.  But it is clear to me that very few vendors (at least
publically) are using the technology or even understand the technology at
this time.  If the UA guidelines prompote certain technologies the UA group
needs to take some actions to see that developers know and understand those
technologies.  Wilson Craig feels that many people in the AITA do not
understand technoloiges like the DOM or the W3C standards.  These workshops
would help assistive technology vendors understand the capabilities of DOM.
 Workshops would present information on principles and show demonstrations
of the capabilities.   Sometimes hearing something more than 

>
>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.

JRG: It may take more than just documentation to help people understand the
the capabilities of a technology.  These workshops would also be targeted
directly at access to WWW based information.

>
>I'm not exactly sure what you are asking of Microsoft in this case.

JRG: I was just wondering if you or other people at microsoft would be
interested in helping to develop the workshops.  There are no concrete
plans at this time and the work is really a part of the education and
outreach working group.  

Jon

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 Monday, 18 January 1999 13:08:33 UTC