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Re: Example of LIFT Text Transcoder solving complexaccessibility issues

for

From: Christian Heilmann
Date: Jul 26, 2006 11:30AM

> Because assistive students want access to that events area NOW. That is
> what we are here for. The alternative is normally somthing along the lines
> of "there are no internal resources available right now, it will take too
> long, the code is too old no-one knows how, there is no money to buy new
> events area, the person that did that left: many many reasons to delay and
> side line accessive support. Our partnership with all size and shape
> organizations brings skilled dedicated resources with solutions to complex
> issues in a unique way.

So why not implement a dedicated events system that does create valid
and accessible markup. That "we need it accessible now and we won't
change the system one bit" argument comes up all the time and is
simply sticking to a solution because you don't want to embarrass
yourself as having spent money on a solution that was just not future
proof. This is a basic flaw of dealing with internet sites as if they
were software frameworks, they just aren't. Change is a big part of
webdesign and pages do get outdated to a degree that it is simply not
feasible of financially clever to change them. A product that does
scrape data off outdated web sites to make them accessible does not
make it easy to get this message through.

If they want the events accessible now write a very simple interface
that displays the data in the DB. If the site has no DB then it is not
an events site, but a mis-use of HTML for dynamic data storage.