Text page generator - Betsie

[Lee Jaffe]

I though members of this list might be interested in Betsie, a utility
which can generate a text version of a page suitable for vision-impaired
users.  Betsy is a Perl script which takes the URL of the subject site
and produces a text version.  The form of entry is

	http://.../cgi-bin/betsie/parser.pl/...[URL]

e.g. http://library.ucsc.edu/cgi-bin/betsie/parser.pl/library.ucsc.edu/

The default format is large text font in yellow (links in blue) on a
black background but there is a range of settings.  These settings
show up as a series of numbers between .pl/ and the URL and can
be pre-selected within the string.

One way to take advantage of this would be to put a link "Text Version"
on any page with a canned anchor, as above, generating the text version
on the fly.  There will be no need to maintain a second text version of pages
or limit page design too radically for ADA considerations.

The Betsie homepage with more information and links for downloading is
http://www.bbc.co.uk/education/betsie/

-- Lee Jaffe, UC Santa Cruz


-- 
==================================================================
Lee David Jaffe               Library Computing & Network Services
168B McHenry Library                                 ldjaffe at cats.ucsc.edu
University of California             831.459.3297  fax: 831.459.8206
Santa Cruz, California 95064       http://people.ucsc.edu/~ldjaffe