> From: Leslie Carr
> I think that the tools for producing
> highly technical (mathematical and scientific) articles do
> not really
> address accessibility issues yet. unless anyone has some good news
> about Office 2007?
Nope. Although it's interesting to note that the standard for the UK
Disability Rights Commission (http://www.drc.org.uk) for accessibility
for the visually impaired is to publish as RTF or MS Word*, because
they've found most visually impaired users have a screen reader that's
very good at scraping what it can out of a Word document. So this
august organisation is taking PDFs and spending considerable human
effort reverse-engineering them into Word documents.
> Surely users of VLE's are often designing material for their own
> purposes, without the imposition of a publisher's style and
> production rules.
And without considering accessibility, if you examine most of the
lecturer-authored content of most VLEs.
> Useful schmuseful. It has to be effective and efficient in a
> business-critical application!
That's the key point. The business of a University staff member who is
publishing research is to publish - whether that is to enhance their own
career or further the aims of the institution (ideally both).
There is then the issue of whether later citation is affected by
accessibility (as opposed to OA). I'm not aware of any figures on this.
However, even if we could demonstrate that it was, business-critical
processes are notoriously resistant to change even in the face of
overwhelming evidence that they're broken.
- Peter
* How do I know? My wife is the main person doing the conversion, and
used to be at the sharp end of getting the comments if the web site's
content was not sufficiently accessible.
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