[WEB4LIB] Re: Accessibility annoyance of the day

[Nancy Sosna Bohm]

No easy answers for the Center for Women Veterans docs, but a few
considerations:
PDFs seem to have become more problematic with the advent of the 5.0 reader.
And the newer versions of Word do a terrible job of 'save as Web page' when
images are involved.
Perhaps a note on the page next to the Word doc links indicating that they
are Word docs would be a polite warning.

on 11/5/02 11:08 AM, Raymond Wood at raywood at magma.ca wrote:

> 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
>