Re: HPR: mere plugin or potential pathfinder?

Gregory and David,

I wanted to clarify a couple of serious technical points.

IBM Home Page Reader is not a plug-in.  It is a browser. Yep, it depends on
Netscape, but only to get the HTML stream (and deal with security). HPR parses
the HTML and presents the page in text and speech. Turns out that HPR uses
plug-in technology in its process of communicating with Netscape. If you call
HPR a player; then it is an HTML player, i.e., a browser! It does not get its
information the same way as JFW or other screen reader.

Home Page Reader can be operated with a mouse, if you are so inclined, but that
is not the primary user interface.

Jim Thatcher
IBM Special Needs Systems
www.ibm.com/sns
thatch@us.ibm.com
(512)838-0432

To:  User Agent Guidelines Emailing List <w3c-wai-ua@w3.org>
cc:   Guido Corona/Austin/IBM@IBMUS
Subject:  HPR: mere plugin or potential pathfinder?





On 21 July 1999, Dave Poehlman, in a post with the Subject line "Re: MINUTES:
W3C WAI User Agent Telecon 21 July 1999" wrote:
>Looking over the minutes sparks within me a comment or two that I hope
>will be helpful.  Hpr as you know cannot be used without netscape so
>therefore it seems to be classable as a plug in or player rather than
>a browser although it does manipulate and allow for the calling of
>content.  It also has serious access issues in that I don't think it
>can be opperated with a mouse but I could be wrong.

aloha, y'all!

as dave poehlman correctly pointed out, HomePage Reader (HPR) _is_ a plugin
that cannot be used without netscape, and, yet, as he and i understand it's
inner workings, HPR does derive the information that it renders from netscape,

much in the same manner as JFW derives the info necessary for reformatting
pages from MSIE...  all of which means that the accessibility information which
the WAI was able to have written into HTML4 _is_ not only capable of being
exposed by netscape, but is, in fact, being exposed (but not rendered) by
netscape...  which is why, when i had the opportunity to speak with guido
corona of IBM SNS at the Vision99 conference in NYC last week, i asked him to
lend the expertise he has derived by working on HPR to the UA WG, for, although
HPR is a plugin, it does provide us with the a practical implementation of the
nascent UA guidelines...

i'm "looking" forward to reaping the benefit of guido's and IBM SNS' expertise
in the UA WG, and i apologize in advance, guido, for putting you on the spot!
        gregory

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Received on Sunday, 25 July 1999 12:59:09 UTC