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From: Michael D. Roush
Date: Nov 21, 2003 4:08PM

Since the W3C has just released Amaya 8.2, is anyone else looking at it? As
a combined authoring/browsing tool, it may be extremely helpful in the realm
of accessibility in design tools. Every significant menu option has a
keyboard shortcut equivalent. Mind you, there are a rather large number of
these, but they are *there*. And the program seems to work fairly well with
JAWS.

Now, Amaya probably does a lot more than the average garden-variety web
designer wants - it contains special editing functions for SVG, MathML, and
all sorts of W3C recommendations that few other packages support.

One thing I like about it a LOT is that there is no distinction between
'browse' and 'edit' mode. You can literally open a web page (graphically)
and type in it, and save your changes locally. What this also allows the
Amaya user to do is open a web page, set his cursor anywhere in the text on
the screen, issue the view source code command, and not only is the source
code shown (in a separate window, a bit troubling), but the cursor in that
window is set to the beginning of the line where the cursor was in the
graphical view - a HUGE timesaver rather than waiting for an entire text
file to be spoken, issuing a 'Find...' command to get to the desired text
(quickly successful only if it is fairly unique text) or guessing how many
lines down one must jump to get to the code in question.

I know quite a few web designers/developers and I know very few who even
know what Amaya is, and fewer still who have it installed or use it. My own
usage of it is limited, but I do use it a lot for 'post-production editing'
after I have generated a page with html-kit.

I'm interested to hear what others think of this. The tool can be found at
http://www.w3.org/Amaya/User/BinDist - the latest release is from 13
November 2003.



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