Hi, Helen,
I quite agree that you can't make accessible pages without work ... and
understanding.
The most work should be put into building high quality templates to
build your work on. Never the less many still need software tools to (a)
help us get good templates and check that they are good, (b) check our
work thereafter to see we haven't missed something, and (c) let's be
honest - there are lots of pages out there and running a software tool
can show / teach people about accessibility so that they know they have
a problem and can start learning it.
We were asked for our opinios of three pieces of software.
I didn't make it clear that A-prompt gives you tools to fix the pages
but these are NOT automatic (apart from a very few options). Therefore
this is at least as good a tool as Bobby for all three situations and
just as good for teaching / learning about accessibility.
Note that some of our information providers are not HTML-literate.
Therefore when comparing the tools:
Bobby was (as of when I used it) unfreindly for many of our users at
least - it gave you HTML and an error message which is not simple to
understand, and you need a fairly deep understanding of accessibility to
understand and fix the problem. Then you change back to your editor and
fix the problem - assuming you can associate the message with the right
part of the web page.
A-Prompt will give you an understandable description with lots of help
text which explains exactly why this is a problem and (most of the time)
give you help fixing it. E.g. this is what your image looks like (not
the path and filename), it has no ALT text and you need this because ...
and you might need a longdesc because ... now what ALT text do you want
and do you want a longdesc? And, yes, it'll automatically add a D-link
if you've asked for it.
Going thru Bobby reports and helping them understand is laudable, but
could be time consuming depending on how many information providers you
have.
What we provided was a course, including a demo of JAWS, backed up with
A-Prompt with its very helpful help files, and backed up with telephone
or e-mail support. The users tested existing pages to know they had a
problem, and were encouraged to build and test good templates, and to
test all web pages to ensure errors fdon't creep in.
Have you tried A-Prompt?
Regards,
Chris
----- Original Message -----
From: "Helen Sargan" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Tuesday, October 28, 2003 9:42 AM
Subject: Re: Accessibility Software
> At 5:30 pm +0000 27/10/03, Chris Beggs wrote:
> >Hi, Louisa,
> >
> >All IMHO of course:
> >
> >Bobby was the first and is the best-known. IMHO it tends to pull up
> >things which are not a problem, and is OK if the end-user knows
HTML -
> >horrid if not. [but I have the old free version, dunno what
> >improvements - if any - have been made since].
>
> I'm just about to give a local course on accessibility, so this is
> close to home at the moment.
>
> In my opinion, if you need to get a grip on the issues and have any
> hope of avoiding them by designing round them, instead of fixing up
> afterwards, you have to persist with Bobby and get to know what it
> all means and whether it is important or not. Relying on a tool to
> fix things is never going to address all the accessibility issues,
> and is always going to put you in the position of making broken pages
> and fixing them (or having them fixed for you) afterwards.
>
> What I'm doing is stepping people through some Bobby reports and
> helping them understand what is wrong and how to avoid it in future.
>
> I realise this is perhaps a counsel of perfection but actually there
> isn't an easy way to make your pages accessible without a bit of work.
> --
> **********************************************************
> Helen Varley Sargan
> Information Provision & Webmaster
> University Computing Service
> New Museums Site email [log in to unmask]
> Pembroke St [log in to unmask]
> Cambridge CB2 3QH Phone 01223 334480
> **********************************************************
>
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