[WEB4LIB] Accessibility annoyance of the day

[Raymond Wood]

On Tue, Nov 05, 2002 at 08:33:47AM -0800, Karen G. Schneider remarked:
> The Center for Women Veterans, http://www.va.gov/womenvet/
> 
> Several key documents, including a FAQ, are only in Microsoft
> Word!
> 
> Note: I am not anti-Microsoft or anti-Word. 

If I have a choice between using essential applications that run
on multiple platforms, as opposed to those that just run on one
(i.e.  windows), I will choose *not* to support those who seek
to lock users into one platform forever and ever.  For example,
I use 'Open Office' instead of 'MS Office'; and I use 'Mozilla'
instead of 'Internet Exploder'; and I use HTML format instead of
proprietary wordprocessor formats when I can.

In short, I try to support accessibility and *choice*.  One
would think that this strategy would be obvious by now, but
apparently this is not the case  =)

MS, along with Weird and their other products, have no interest
in supporting freedom of choice; they only seek to support MS,
and kill off any other major competition.  It is 'vendor-lockin
on steroids'.  In short, IMO if one supports freedom of software
choice, it does not make sense to support the MS regime.

> But for cryin' out loud, even providing these documents in PDF
> would be better than only in Word.  

Perhaps to a degree:  PDF is at least cross-platform.  On the
other hand it is still a proprietary format that requires
expensive software just to do anything more than read it.  I
thought this was the whole point of HTML -- an open standard
that facilitated the sharing of textual and multimedia
information  ;)

> This site is supposedly reaching out to women veterans who may
> need emergency health care, who need to know their benefits,
> who could be homeless women sitting at public computers...
> good grief. Your tax dollars at work! (And how hard could it
> be to generate a 25-question FAQ into HTML?!)

Exactly.  And the same thing could be said for hundreds if not
thousands of web sites littered across the Net.  Fortunately
accessibility as a 'web issue' seems to be on the rise recently.

> Oh, the irony: they link to their own Accessibility Guidelines: 
> http://www.va.gov/accessible/

Well, that is just braindead, is it not?

> Yes, I wrote them (and among other things, said that as a
> veteran, I hoped they would make this page accessible to my
> sister veterans). 
> 
> ----------------------------------------------
> Karen G. Schneider kgs at lii.org  http://lii.org 

My $0.02,
Raymond