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RE: [FWD] Universities Legal Web Accessibility Update

for

From: Spruill, Kevin (NIH/NLM)
Date: Nov 20, 2003 10:38AM

Thanx for passing that along Sarah, and thank you Paul for pointing out the
utter fallacy of their statement re: "1. Does a University web site have to
be Section 508 Compliant?". Unfortunately, there are far too many
organizations that will blindly believe this, because they don't know
enough. Hopefully, at the very least someone will point it out to Usable...
Perhaps someone from their legal dept. and we can get this fixed before too
much damage is done.

HK

-----Original Message-----
From: <EMAIL REMOVED> [mailto: <EMAIL REMOVED> ]
Sent: Tuesday, November 18, 2003 1:10 PM
To: <EMAIL REMOVED>
Subject: [FWD] Universities Legal Web Accessibility Update


I thought WebAIM readers might be interested in this unsolicited
info-advertisement I received from Usablenet. I found it more than a little
troubling that they seem to be promoting their text transcoder as a solution
to 504/ADA compliance:

"Basically, you need to offer good access to digital content and offering a
text mode would be an easy way to achieve this."

I expect this language will be very enticing to schools who want to/have to
make their sites accessible, especially the "easy" part. It's hard work
retrofitting a site for accessibility, and most colleges/universities do not
have centralized control and resources. The idea of slapping a "text-only
version" link on all pages and getting on it is going to sound mightly
attractive.

Does anyone else find this troubling?

Sarah


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