Re: Documents now public

At 02:27 AM 10/5/2005, Al Gilman wrote:
>... As Rich said, it's best to start with the Roadmap. ...

Thanks. I guess "Rich" is Richard Schwerdtfeger and "the Roadmap" is his 
"Dynamic Accessible Web Content Roadmap", W3C Working Draft, September 23, 
2005 <http://www.w3.org/WAI/PF/roadmap/>.

>... In their present state, our drafts *may* be penetrable  by people who, 
>like your students, have already bruised their knuckles on another such 
>application. ... And if you can interest your students in spending some 
>time with these materials, we would very much like to hear from them.

My students are at the top university in Australia, in a building with some 
of the cleverest IT people in the world (they go on to places like IBM 
research labs, Google and Microsoft Research Labs). But I have a lot of 
trouble convincing them that accessibility is worthy of their attention. 
The roadmap will help as it clearly explains what it wants to do and then 
has some technical stuff they will like.

But I have mostly given up trying to convince anyone that accessibility is 
worth doing because it will help those with a disability. I give a homily 
on accessibility to the undergraduate and postgraduate students 
<http://www.tomw.net.au/2005/wd/testing.html>. But it is far more effective 
when dealing with business people to say it will enable applications to 
work on mobile devices used by high net worth customers. Even with a 
humanitarian application for emergency management I have suggested using 
accessibility features for efficiency 
<http://www.tomw.net.au/2005/wd/sahana.html>.

In the case of the researchers and students, I could see them being 
interested in a flexible user interface for the robot submarines tested in 
a tank outside my window <http://nieis.anu.edu.au/news/news_smallsub.html> 
or for the swarms of robot aircraft down the road at the Defence Department 
<http://www.tomw.net.au/blog/2005/09/last-day-of-searcc-2005-in-sydney.html>.

Now I know of the roadmap I can tell them about it. But you need to tell us 
all clearly what you are doing and point us to the useful documents.



Tom Worthington FACS HLM tom.worthington@tomw.net.au Ph: 0419 496150
Director, Tomw Communications Pty Ltd            ABN: 17 088 714 309
PO Box 13, Belconnen ACT 2617                http://www.tomw.net.au/
Director, ACS Communications Tech Board   http://www.acs.org.au/ctb/
Visiting Fellow, ANU      Blog: http://www.tomw.net.au/blog/atom.xml

Received on Thursday, 6 October 2005 00:24:08 UTC