Re: documentation question

I can give an example of how electronic documentation might be inaccessible.

Yesterday, as I was leaving work, I chanced upon some of our faculty
creating on-line materials for the education department.  They were scanning
images of old handouts into electronic form, then converting the images to
PDF format for posting to the web.  All of this information would be
electronic (no paper anywhere), but would be completely inaccessible, since
it wasn't even PDF of a word processor page, but PDF of a graphic image of a
page!

Any well meaning but clueless company might do the same thing, and have no
idea why their material wasn't accessible.

Denis Anson

----------
>From: David Poehlman <poehlman@clark.net>
>To: Ian Jacobs <ij@w3.org>
>Cc: WAI User Agent Working Group <w3c-wai-ua@w3.org>
>Subject: Re: documentation question
>Date: Fri, Aug 27, 1999, 9:26 PM
>

> agreed.  Thanks!
> Ian Jacobs wrote:
>>
>> David Poehlman wrote:
>> >
>> > is it possible for documentation to conform to wcag and still be
>> > inaccessible?
>>
>> I think it's possible for a document
>> to conform to WCAG and not be accessible. Even if WCAG
>> were perfect (which it's not), it would still be possible.
>> But if WCAG is good, it will be unlikely.
>>
>> As to your proposal below, I think we don't need to add the
>> word "accessible". We could say "Ensure that you have
>> accessible electronic documentation." But to the question
>> "How do you know it's accessible?" the best we can answer
>> today with any supporting material is "If it conforms to WCAG."
>> So we can jump straight to "Ensure you have documentation
>> that conforms to WCAG."
>>
>>  - Ian
>>
>> >  or to put it another way, would it be redundant to add
>> > the word accessible to the following taken from the minutes?
>> > >
>> > > Does accessible doc checkpoint apply to non Web-based docs?
>> > >
>> > > Proposed: Add "electronic".
>> > >
>> > > CMN: But must add that documentation must be available in electronic
form.
>> > > "Ensure that there is a
>> > > version of the product documentation that conforms to WCAG 1.0"
>>
>> That's an interesting question. I
>>
>> --
>> Ian Jacobs (jacobs@w3.org)   http://www.w3.org/People/Jacobs
>> Tel/Fax:                     +1 212 684-1814
>
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Received on Saturday, 30 October 1999 09:36:41 UTC