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Re: UK BSI PAS 78 guide

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From: Tim Beadle
Date: Mar 16, 2006 4:50AM

On 16/03/06, Tim Beadle < <EMAIL REMOVED> > wrote:
> It is sponsored by the Disability Rights Commission and gets the
> thumbs up from the RNIB, so something tells me that all may not be
> well with it (or am I allowing my view to be coloured by past experience
> of the RNIB? Who knows...).

I've just had a phone call from Julie Howell at the RNIB, and I wanted
to clarify my above comments.

I was involved in some work probably three or four years ago to get
"See It Right" accreditation from the RNIB for one of our online
services. My experience then wasn't entirely great as, try as we
might, we could not meet the accreditation criteria. The outstanding
issue was alternative access to multimedia, as I recall, which is
difficult to achieve when the multimedia is, say, an animation
depicting a moving waveform in a physics experiment.

I'm sorry to say that I allowed that experience to colour my comments
this morning, and for that I would like to apologise. Julie has
explained to me how the RNIB is a markedly different organization than
it was when I last dealt with it, and how much consultation and buy-in
from the community there has been with PAS 78.

Thanks to Julie for telephoning me personally and giving me the background.

Best regards,

Tim