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Thread: Course Genie and accessibility
Number of posts in this thread: 3 (In chronological order)
From: Gary Williamson
Date: Fri, Mar 16 2007 8:30AM
Subject: Course Genie and accessibility
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Generator Microsoft Word 11 (filtered medium) I' m looking at ways of simplifying the process of repurposing documents for the web (for academics). I' ve tried out Course Genie and it seems simple enough and purports to being Accessible (to priority 1,2 and 3). Has anyone used it and is it really accessible.
Note: I ran a document created in Course Genie through the W3C validator and it did highlight one error: there is no attribute "ONBEFOREUNLOAD" but I don' t think this is an issue that would influence accessibility. Unless you know better?
Regards
Gary
From: John Foliot - Stanford Online Accessibility Program
Date: Fri, Mar 16 2007 11:10AM
Subject: Re: Course Genie and accessibility
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Gary Williamson wrote:
>
> Note: I ran a document created in Course Genie through the W3C
> validator and it did highlight one error: there is no attribute
> "ONBEFOREUNLOAD" but I don' t think this is an issue that would
> influence accessibility. Unless you know better?
Hmmm... Microsoft-ism. [http://tinyurl.com/2x2t6]
What is firing with this event? From reading up at the above URL, it sounds
like it might be fairly benign: what happens when you disable JavaScript? If
the call has anything to do that is "mission critical" you might have a
problem; as well, since it is non-standard it may not perform as expected in
alternative user-agents, so I would be cautious of the client side
scripting... (Not saying it *is* a problem, only that it *may* be a problem)
The only other thing is that if you are MANDATED to hit Priority 2 you
can't/won't, as P2:3.2 states "Create documents that validate to published
formal grammars" (unless of course you are also using a custom DTD that
includes this non-standard scripting event)
FWIW
JF
From: Eoin Campbell
Date: Wed, Mar 21 2007 3:50AM
Subject: Re: Course Genie and accessibility
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You can inspect sample courseGenie HTML output online
at http://www.horizonwimba.com/demos/coursegenie/courses/Demo/
from the Word document http://www.horizonwimba.com/demos/coursegenie/courses/Demo.doc
and decide whether it is accessible or not.
I had a quick look, and believe that the results are not great,
but I should declare an interest - we also have similar Word to
HTML conversion software that we think does a better job on
accessibility in particular:
Headings - Headings in Word are converted to HTML headings, but
not properly nested.
Images - Images in Word are converted, and text inserted
in the Web field of the image in Word is inserted into the HTML
IMG ALT attribute, or into a D-link.
Tables - Table headings in Word (identified using the Heading Row Repeat flag)
are not converted into heading cells in HTML. (Complex tables with merged cells
are not supported either.)
Self-test questions - Self-test questions are stored as Word tables, and converted
to HTML forms, but no labels are generated, so they are not very accessible.
"Gary Williamson" wrote:
I' m looking at ways of simplifying the process of repurposing documents for the web (for academics). I' ve tried out Course Genie and it seems simple enough and purports to being Accessible (to priority 1,2 and 3). Has anyone used it and is it really accessible.
Note: I ran a document created in Course Genie through the W3C validator and it did highlight one error: there is no attribute "ONBEFOREUNLOAD" but I don' t think this is an issue that would influence accessibility. Unless you know better?
--
Eoin Campbell, Technical Director, XML Workshop Ltd.
10 Greenmount Industrial Estate, Harolds Cross, Dublin, Ireland.
Phone: +353 1 4547811; fax: +353 1 4496299.
Email: = EMAIL ADDRESS REMOVED = ; web: www.xmlw.ie
YAWC: One-click web publishing from Word!
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