WebAIM - Web Accessibility In Mind

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RE: LIFT Text Transcoder

for

From: Stewart, Ron
Date: Jul 26, 2006 11:20AM

Good morning,

I was going to stay out of this one, but it has been a bad day and this
does not help. This conversation repeats itself every couple of years,
and will probably continue to do so until colleges and universities
fully understand what accessibility and usability are about, something
that can not be relied on from vendors who's bottom line interest is to
not have them educated.

This is an old and often repeated discussion on several fronts, those of
us who have been involved in it over the years tend to not even say
anything anymore. I have talked to the UsableNET folks several times,
and have asked them to tone down the rhetoric their marketing folks are
using, but obviously to no avail. This is a second class solution that
results in a back of the bus mentality in regards to accessibility.
While it does result in a website that technically meets the letter of
the law, I think it is a long way from meeting the spirit of the law!

The tool only works on websites that are basically accessible on the
front end, and if they are not accessible it takes a fair amount of work
on the part of the web development staff, or even easier you can pay
UsableNET to do it for you, at a fairly decent cost. When the real
"accessibility experts" start using this and other products of its kind,
then I will start recommending it to the colleges and universities that
I work with. At this point I suggest to them to ignore the high
pressure marketing, and spend their money on educating and testing of
their sites with persons with disabilities.

Lets end this tit for tat discussion and get back to talking about REAL
accessibility

Ron Stewart

*********************************************************************
Ron Stewart
Technology Advisor - AHEAD
Chair, AHEAD E-Text Solutions Group
66 Witherspoon Street Suite 352
Princeton, NJ 08542
<EMAIL REMOVED>
http://www.ahead.org