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Re: Course Genie and accessibility

for

From: Eoin Campbell
Date: Mar 21, 2007 3:50AM

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 REMOVED> ; web: www.xmlw.ie
YAWC: One-click web publishing from Word!
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