[WEB4LIB] Re: Accessibility annoyance of the day

[Richard Harrison]

My solution is a Linux box and VMWare with multiple (duly licensed)
flavors of Windows. I suppose I might put up Mac virtual machine, if the
good folks at VMWare supported it, but only "might" - I doubt I'll ever
have a Mac customer. I can convert Mac files to something ingestible by
Win/Lin or vice-versa, if I absolutely must. This was not a painless or
cheap solution, but I no longer bump into files I can't handle
gracefully. A single such box can go a long way as a Rosetta Stone for a
larger community of machines.

For the rest of the world, living in single OS boxes...

- Star office is cheap for the mainstreamers in the OS universe
(Win/Lin);

- Open Office is free for the mainstreamers and in beta for Mac.

There are converters (software) cheap and free on the web, if you look
around. It does require gumption to go look 'em up and then download,
install, and use 'em. This can be a chore, given the vagaries of some
the of the tools, but they will work with a bit of effort.

For professionals (from anywhere on the information science spectrum),
there's no good excuse for an incapacity to handle any (at least
reasonably) popular document format. A single, ubiquitous standard would
be wonderful, but it ain't the real world of today, and at times I
nearly despair of living long enough to witness it. How many of us
complain about the proprietary markup of M$Word but regularly rely on it
instead of using HTML, XML, or RTF, 'cuz we're lazy and want purty
documents? Thus, selleth the Evil Empire of Redmond (and various peers)
its wares. Mighty few of us (not I) are pristinely pure crusaders,
cleaving flawlessly to the ideal of providing the one truly universal
format of the moment, raw ASCII...heck, that forces non-English speakers
to submit to our character-set (will there be raised a hue and cry from
the Unicoders in our midst?).

Our employing institutions have different motives in deciding what
software to provide/support than should we as professionals. Often those
making the spending decisions are ignorant as a stump of lower cost
alternatives, or they are fearful of the new and relatively untried
(like the M$ products are soooo reliable, right?). If we live in a
benighted land, technologically speaking, it is up to us to light a
candle not curse the darkness. Well, okay, maybe light and curse.

Regards,
<geek>Richard</geek>