WebAIM - Web Accessibility In Mind

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RE: Dreamweaver 8 first impressions

for

From: Andrew Kirkpatrick
Date: Sep 15, 2005 10:00AM

First of all, thanks for the review, Jared. I'll be checking your
issues against bugs we've logged internally.

> I read the earlier post where Jared mentioned that the
> accessibility reports that were generated seemed overly
> complicated and I have concerns that this in itself could be
> counter productive, as developers who are new to
> accessibility could very easily just "turn off accessibility
> dialogue" if it all got too much for them. And its feasible
> that many will. I thought I may be able to discuss this but, no dice.

This is a complicated topic, and one that we're interested in your
feedback on. I agree that as a rule, manual checks can to be
overwhelming in any web accessibility evaluation tool, in Dreamweaver or
not. If you are familiar with the manual checks that need to be done and
just want to use the checker as a quick test to make sure that you
aren't missing anything that the tools can find, you can disable all
manual checks which tends to reduce the volume considerably.

> couple of questions for the Macromedia team. You seemed to be
> able to put content into Contribute (from MS Word et al) and
> bounce it into you webpage template and easily update your
> website. Fine. But is it structured content? Will Contribute
> apply any semantic structure to unformatted content?

Contribute will not add semantics when there is none already, but if you
specify headings, links, table headings, tables, lists, etc., Contribute
will create the appropriate HTML elements.

AWK

Andrew Kirkpatrick
Principal Accessibility Engineer, Macromedia
<EMAIL REMOVED>